Hard to Get: Fast Talk and Rude Questions Along the Interview Trail

This collection of interviews that have appeared in Esquire , Playboy and Rolling Stone , etc. shows Collins to be a tenacious, stop-at-nothing interviewer. The celebrities met here are a cross-section of hot properties of the early '80s: Roone Arledge, Robin Williams and Mikhail Baryshnikov among them. Although the lengthy introduction gets the book off to a slow start, the pieces possess an immediacy that holds up although they were written 10 years ago. One tale of journalistic skulduggerystet one l, per Web. sparkles with intrigue--Collins's breaching of the extensive pre-publication security surrounding H. R. Haldeman's The Ends of Power to get an early copy of the book for the Washington Post . Other bright spots include accounts of Baryshnikov's defection from the Soviet Union, Sylvester Stallone's fastidiousness and Dudley Moore's preoccupation with sex. (Nov.)