Power, Money, Fame, Sex: A User's Guide

Wisdom and fun abound on every page of this delicious hybrid of two popular genres: self-help and lifestyles-of-the-rich-and-famous. Gleefully offering strategic advice for the unabashedly ambitious (e.g., ""If you're charismatic, make sure you have writers and historians around you""), Craft Rubin distills key research findings into True Rules of alarming simplicity, such as ""Those who marry for money earn every penny"" and ""Succs de scandale is better than no succs at all."" Decked out in a kicky graphic design, the primary text is interspersed with useful tips (""Never give anonymously""), photographs of celebrities flaunting their privileges and quotations from writers as diverse as Henry Adams and Judith Krantz. An adjunct professor at the Yale Law School, Craft Rubin offers generous servings of dish on such subjects as the number of times a day the late duchess of Windsor had her hair done, and spins through a discussion of crassly calculating tactics with apparent ease, in a tone adeptly balanced between dead-seriousness and tongue-in-cheek humor. Chapters on the blues associated with scaling the heights of power, money, fame and/or sex will prove reassuring to all who have fallen short of their personal goals in these areas. Craft Rubin's hilarious categories of ""trustafarians,"" ""split-erati,"" ""fame parasites,"" ""stalker-azzi,"" ""arm candy"" and ""jackpots"" could easily pass into common parlance as exactly the right terms for the most obnoxiously self-absorbed climbers in any chic coterie. Agents, Christy Fletcher and Michael Carlisle. (Sept.)