How to Meet and Hang Out With the Stars: A Totally Unauthorized Guide by Bret Saxon and Steve Stein (Citadel Press, 230 pgs., $12.95)

There's only one word to describe this handbook for sneaking into celebrity functions and haunting superstar haunts: pathetic. In their celebrity psychosis, Saxon and Stein come across as only slightly more benign versions of John Hinckley and Mark David Chapman--held in check, perhaps, because the famous objects of their pathological affections are so much more indiscriminate. From Don Knotts to Don Ho, Francis Ford Coppola to Andrew Dice Clay, all it takes to rate in the Saxon-Stein superstar pantheon is any form of celebrity, coupled with a willingness to sign autographs and pose for pictures with intrusive jerks like themselves. Copiously illustrated with bleary photos of one or the other (but never both) of the authors standing near enough to a famous face to pretend they know the person it belongs to, this "how-to" is padded out to publication length by over a hundred pages of something called a "Celebrity Index," in which Saxon and Stein rank the stars based on how cooperative they were when the authors accosted them. No wonder so many celebrities are prone to punch their "fans" these days. Here's hoping some semi-famous figure gets around to kicking these two very deserving butts in the very near future. 

There is only one way to describe this review of Steve Stein and Bret Saxon and their great book