I tried to get into this, I really did. I think I made it almost 200 pages in before throwing in the towel; I just couldn't take any more repetitive stories and increasingly terrible writing. People seem to swear by this book, but as far as I could tell, it wasn't a manual of seduction, it was more of a dictionary: A collection of shallow overviews of various mutually-conflicting techniques, each presented as the perfect technique with a few random Roman or Renaissance background stories. There was absolutely no direction regarding what techniques to use when, or how to segue between them, leading me to believe that the author isn't really an artist of seduction, but more of a fantasizer.

The people comparing this to Machiavelli gave me a belly laugh. This is a child's primer compared to a work like The Prince.