Andy Warhol was so enamored with Polaroids that he made special arrangements with the company to purchase all the overstock film of a discontinued model of camera. A similar photographic fetish is the organizing principle of Don't Try This at Home. For kicks, rocker and author Dave Navarro installed a carnival-grade photo booth in his L.A. home. The book documents a year's worth of visitors to Navarro's pad who all stepped into the booth to get their mug shots snapped.

The resulting dispatch from Hell is as hard to draw one's eyes from as a twelve car pile-up. Intermingled with a parade of rock stars, models, prostitutes, drug dealers, pizza delivery guys, and housecleaners are a series of observations and interviews with Dave and his co-author Neil Strauss. Strauss, co-author of other tomes for Jenna Jameson, Marilyn Manson, and Motley Crue, operates less as an editor than as a ringmaster to this debauched thing rock stars call a lifestyle.

Don't Try This At Home is one rollicking contact high of a memoir. Just set it on the coffee table at your home and watch how quickly it snares its readers. -–Ryan Boudinot

In a book originally scheduled for publication in 2001, rock guitarist Navarro (Jane's Addiction; Red Hot Chili Peppers) and rock journalist Strauss (coauthor of bestselling celeb autobios including Mötley Crüe's thrillingly crude The Dirt, Marilyn Manson's The Long Hard Road Out of Hell and Jenna Jameson's How to Make Love Like a Porn Star) chronicle the year Navarro turned his house into "a cross between a crack den, an after-hours club, a halfway house and Andy Warhol's Factory" to test his theory that "[t]he only people who stay in your life are the ones you pay." Navarro had had messy breakups with his girlfriend and his record label, and he'd decided to start using drugs again. He installs a photo booth and low-tech surveillance equipment to record every rock star, sycophant, drug dealer and prostitute who stops by his house. The book's 57 episodic chapters (some of which are simply transcripts) relate the demise of a relationship, drug overdoses and detoxes; they include Navarro's jokes about a "committed three-way relationship" and his pseudo-philosophical ruminations about the impossibility of romantic love for the emotionally challenged. Drug-addled chapters such as "Ten Ways to Tie Off" and photo strips of wacked-out, cosmetically enhanced women speak to a sort of quasi-glamorous, semisick, half-desperate pathos. Navarro's experiences turn out to be a lesson in accepting the "rainbow of emotions that come along with life," and there's even a happy ending, as he sobers up, restarts his career and gets married. Weirdly fascinating for a while, but ultimately for the fans. Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.