TFM Total Frat Move

Kirkus Reviews

Steve Stifler writes a book…with his elbows. If you're wondering what your Greek-pledged son or daughter is up to at school, this is your guidebook--and you won't be happy with how your tuition money is being spent. If your son is like Bolen, then he's drunk and obsessed with bagging at least a 7. (Bolen's peers will understand.) If your daughter is like one of Bolen's hookups, then she's not a woman but a "slampiece" who, if she wishes to succeed, will have "two trophy-worthy tits." The unnamed campus on which Bolen's book is set, one that, by appearances, is somewhere on the Gulf Coast, is awash in cocaine, bourbon and vomit; whether classes are actually taught there is anyone's guess, but to judge by this woeful treatise, it's an activity of quaternary importance at best. So is the world outside the frat house, the milieu of "tiny Asian women in a Malaysian sweatshop sewing shoes" and other such unworthy, unpinned members of society. To call this portrait of "Greek" life obnoxious is to risk understatement, but the ideal reader will be similarly allied with a fraternity, will be a braggart about sex, will not have sex without the assistance of alcohol, will not spend a waking hour without a beer, will own a large flat-screen TV and will have only the slightest shred of self-awareness. Readers without these qualities will want to pass. Suffice it to say that Stifler, that preternaturally perfect exemplar of the frat mentality in the American Pie series, was detestable but funny, whereas Bolen, by this account, lacks the latter attribute. "Fat, drunk and stupid is no way to go through life, son." So quoth Dean Wormer in Animal House, where the frat boys sometimes went to class. Someone tell Bolen.