http://www.slate.com/articles/arts/books/2015/10/neil_strauss_the_truth_reviewed.html

The only edition of Neil Strauss’ The Game: Penetrating the Secret Society of Pickup Artists available at my local bookstore comes bound in gold-embossed faux leather with gilded page edges and a satiny red ribbon to mark your place. It looks like a combination of Bible and diary, which matches its contents: one part rules to live by, one part gut-spilling. Published in 2005, The Game recounts a two-year period during which Strauss, an entertainment journalist for the New York Times and Rolling Stone, hung out with and absorbed the strategies of the pickup artist, or PUA, subculture, men who have transformed the delicate dance of flirtation into a kind of step-by-step recipe. It culminates with Strauss and a troupe of other full-time seducers moving into “Project Hollywood,” a rented mansion just off the Sunset Strip—the former residence of Dean Martin—where they attract scores of disciples, lead dating workshops, and eventually turn on each other like crabs in a bucket, but not before Courtney Love crashes in a commandeered bedroom for a few months. “She was probably the sanest person in the house,” Strauss writes. “And that was a scary thought.”