The basic joke is good for a little while, but not enough to sustain a whole book, and it's been rendered less humorous by the events of the Bush years. The basic theme is that the author is, tongue in cheek, advocating the adoption of total ruthlessness, abusiveness, and amorality as an interpersonal style. The problem for me is that after all the corporate and political scandals of the last eight years, after the Iraq war, it's not very funny anymore, and I can't read this without seeing the faces of Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, Gonzales, Delay, and a lot of the business people with whom they were in bed, and those people aren't funny at all.