ClueChick: real clues from a real chick

Play or Be Played: What Every Female Should Know About Men, Dating and Relationships by Tariq "K-Flex" Nasheed.

Nutshell review: Run, do not walk, to your nearest bookstore or library and get any other book you find there to avoid purchasing this one.

Longer review: I got this book because, although it's geared toward women, I figured, really, how different is the game from the male perspective or the female one? And this fellow wrote an earlier book for men, called The Art of Mackin', so he's looked at it from both perspectives. Or something. Well, based on his writing, he's at least thought about how to sell a book.

Now, as you may have gathered, this book is geared toward the black dating crowd (and I'm white), but I'm not an essentialist, so I didn't imagine it would much matter (and I was right -- the book is pretty lame, regardless of what racial community you're part of).

The basis of this book is that men and women each have two driving forces, a primal need and a social need. For men, the primal need is to have an orgasm, and the social need is to have power through leadership. For women, the primal need is to get attention and her social need is to get appreciation.

Uh. Yeah.

The book goes on along those lines, spouting some impressively bad pseudo science for about 200 pages, using most of that to back up the premise that women should act like "queens" and hold out for "kings" and thus avoid the "cavemen". This is not a good book.

It does, however, include ten tips, which are summarized on the last page, several of which are good (I'm only including the good ones here):

1. Always take full responsibility for your actions and decisions.
2. Try to smile as much as you can.
3. Become a "nonverbal language" reader.
5. Learn to realize and accept when something isn't working for you.
6. Be comfortable in knowing that you have the power to accumulate the knowledge and game you need to improve yourself.
8. Don't rely on the "be-a-bitch" tactic to get quality men.
9. Always exercise self-control.

You'll note that these might be useful for people of whatever gender, pursuing people of whatever other (or not other) gender. Basically, this advice is: be smart, know yourself, rely on yourself, and be confident in yourself. There, I just saved you $12 and a trip to the bookstore!