This is a successful book. It is not a how-to for creating lasting, loving, intimate relationships of mutual respect and trust. Some of those may arise of their own accord out of the advice given in this book, but it is in fact a how-to for conquests. Notches on the belt or the bed-post. Luring victims, capturing their interest until they are sick with lust/love and can think only of you, pouncing on their vulnerability. The advice is smart, sexy, and mindful of gender equality. It conveys well the information it wishes to impart. Suggested reading for active and prospective sex workers.

I have gone back to Jed's books (of which this is the last of three) often over the last two years, and Warfare has certainly been the most practical of them most of those times. I am an Adult. I did the transition, but it's taken me a damn long time to realize that I got myself into a hole as soon as it was feasible after making the leap. I just pulled myself out a couple weeks ago, and I know that I can never go back (thank god) and that it was the best thing in the world for me to have done (thank god!). This is a book about trusting yourself, getting down to the basics of who you are and what the hell it is you're doing in your life. It's about radical change, burning your life down, and building something completely new. It's beautiful, terrible, scary, and so wonderful. It's about living.

This is the book that changed my life. If it changes no one else's, it's still done its job. Many people, including a few reviewers here, see apparent contradictions in Jed's books (of which this is the first of three) as detractions from the point of them. Not to pull punches, I think that's a shallow reading, and one that neatly skips over the big questions that this book is made to bring up. Is there meaning in anything? Can I trust anyone's identification of the world but my own? What is this place? Who am I? What the hell do I do now? If you're not addressing those and equally deep questions for yourself -- not for anyone else, but just so that you can fully live your life -- then you're just fucking around, wasting your life.