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The Stingray: Lethal Tactics of the Sole Survivor : The Inside Story of How the Castaways Were Controlled on the Island and Beyond Paperback – December 1, 2000

by Peter Lance (Author)
3.3 3.3 out of 5 stars 23 ratings
See all formats and editions
Provides a day-by-day narrative of the summer televison series, analyzes Richard Hatch's Machiavellian tactics to survive, and indicates the CBS network's manipulation of the series and its contestants.
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  1. Print length
    278 pages
  2. Language
    English
  3. Publisher
    Cinema Twenty One Books
  4. Publication date
    December 1, 2000
  5. Dimensions
    6 x 1 x 9 inches
  6. ISBN-10
    1885840039
  7. ISBN-13
    978-1885840035
  8. See all details
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The%20Amazon%20Book%20Review
The Amazon Book Review
Book recommendations, author interviews, editors' picks, and more. Read it now.

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

Seventy-one million Americans watched Richard Hatch win $1 million on the Survivor television series during the summer of 2000. He was the brilliant strategist and ruthless manipulator that viewers loved to hate. Then Hatch's $500,000 book deal to spill the inside secrets of his Survivor strategies and his life story got throttled by CBS. Trampled in the scuffle was Hatch's cowriter, five-time Emmy-winning investigative journalist Peter Lance. Hatch had led him to believe that CBS permission was in the bag, and Lance had already spent months working on the book when the deal died. So Lance went ahead and wrote his own book, full of those delectably greasy little details that Survivor fans hunger for, and including his own first-person observations. He provides a day-by-day commentary on the series, exposes several sides of Richard Hatch that we didn't see, and offers disturbing evidence that CBS manipulated events and people.

Lance knew "Dickie" Hatch as a child and is compassionate when detailing his early life. Hatch was an overweight, lonely child, wearing Coke-bottle thick glasses, sexually victimized by bullies before age 10, smoking pot and cigarettes by sixth grade, and becoming a "serious drinker" as an adult. (Hatch no longer drinks or smokes.) The Stingray does not flatter the present-day Richard Hatch, however, calling him "villainous" and a liar (off the series as well as on). Lance quotes a management consultant describing Hatch as "a wild animal who went to school." "King Richard" was brilliant at winning the throne through "guile, deceit and the strength of his will," says Lance, but "he behaved like a hick on a Starline Hollywood Tour when it came to using his fame as a launching pad for the rest of his life."

Lance reveals CBS's stranglehold on the castaways' ability to earn money post-Survivor by gatekeeping every offer and rejecting all that competed with CBS programming or sponsors. He offers unsettling substantiation that CBS distorted events, shifted the sequence of scenes, and may have tainted the voting. The book's organization seems hasty and haphazard at times, with topics frequently raised in one chapter and revisited in another. But if you're a Survivor devotee, this is a must-read. The title refers to the way Hatch compared his skewering stingrays for food to his treatment of the other castaways: "Stab. Blood in the water. Bye bye baby." --Joan Price

Review

...a blistering, unauthorized, inside story about the life of Richard Hatch, a play by play account of his tactics... -- Rudyreigns, Survivor Website

A tell-all, giving the inside story of [Richard] Hatch's Machivellian strategy ... a guide to potential pitfalls for aspiring reality-show contestants. -- P.J. Mark, Inside

Emmy-winning former ABC journalist and novelist Peter Lance takes a cold, hard look at reality television programming... -- Wm. J. Birnes, Bestselling author of THE DAY AFTER ROSWELL

Product details

  • Publisher ‏ : ‎ Cinema Twenty One Books (December 1, 2000)
  • Language ‏ : ‎ English
  • Paperback ‏ : ‎ 278 pages
  • ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 1885840039
  • ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-1885840035
  • Item Weight ‏ : ‎ 13.6 ounces
  • Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 6 x 1 x 9 inches
  • Customer Reviews:
    3.3 3.3 out of 5 stars 23 ratings

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3.3 out of 5 stars
23 global ratings

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Top reviews from the United States

  • RAE ELLEN VALADE
    5.0 out of 5 stars best book I've ever read!!!!!
    Reviewed in the United States on March 22, 2001
    As a travel agent from Los Angeles I spend quite a bit of time on planes. I was fortunate enough, a year or so back, to come across Peter Lance's best selling novel FIRST DEGREE BURN and I couldn't put it down. In fact, I couldn't get to sleep that night until I finished it. It had such an impact on me that I was moved to write my first review for amazon.com. Often, a writer's second book doesn't measure up, but even though THE STINGRAY is a work of non-fiction, it has the same riveting
    page-turning style as his first book. I was an on again/off again fan of the first Survivor series, but since reading THE STINGRAY I've been glued to Survivor II. I even went out and bought the DVD, both of Mark Burnett's books and Richard Hatch's anemic 101 Survival Secrets.
    I can tell you unequivocally that THE STINGRAY: Lethal Tactics of The Sole Survivor is the best book on this blockbuster series bar non. For one who hadn't really seen the first show, THE STINGRAY was a great play
    by play of what happened along with a lot of the inside dirt on how Hatch was able to win. Frankly, after reading this and understanding what a tumultuous life Hatch led, you have more respect for him and appreciate even more his victory, which the Australian Outbackers are now trying to duplicate.
    Living in Los Angles and dealing with a lot of people in the entertainment industry though, I was particularly fascinated by Lance's insights into the world of fame and pop culture. He discusses in detail that it's not enough just to win one of these reality shows... You also have to be smart about how you handle your new found fame. In a world where 15 minute celebrities crash and burn, this aspect of the book for me, was most interesting.
    Peter is doing a lot of signings in California and New York and I hope to find him at one of the bookstores so that I can buy a couple of more copies for my friends and get them signed. His website is also very informative and he does a weekly analysis of Survivor. I can't recommend this book highly enough. It's a great read.
    3 people found this helpful
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  • Ethan Straffin
    1.0 out of 5 stars "Hatch"et job
    Reviewed in the United States on March 7, 2001
    Verified Purchase
    Bleah. Well, I for one expected better. A lot better. A four-star average rating? I try to be generous in my reviews whenever possible, but the fact that this kind of "reporting" can win even online acclaim saddens me. It's no wonder that Shadow Lawn Press couldn't come up with a single back-cover endorsement from a publication whose words have appeared on actual paper.
    First of all, the copyediting in this book is positively atrocious. Practically every paragraph has a misplaced word or a phrase that simply doesn't make any sense. ("In a cruel irony that only Richard himself might appreciate..." Well, obviously you appreciate it too, Peter, or you wouldn't have pointed it out.) Punctuation and capitalization are deployed more or less at random. Forced, sensationalist metaphors and appallingly lame cliches abound. Lance clearly envisions himself an investigative journalist extraordinaire, but he writes like a high-school newspaper staffer, and Shadow Lawn obviously didn't consider it worthwhile to do anything about it. No matter how much she tries to focus on the substance, any reader who respects the English language enough to object to its abuse is liable to find herself distracted, several times per page, by the truly awful style.
    Not that the substance itself is much better. I'm not a big fan of either Richard Hatch or major TV networks like CBS, but Lance -- who clearly is still extremely bitter over the death of his plans to co-write a book with Hatch -- bends so far over backward to vilify both that I almost started to feel sorry for them. A good investigative journalist doesn't need to use colorful language in every other sentence to remind us how odious his targets, er, subjects are. If he has done his job well, the unsavory details he uncovers will speak for themselves with only occasional editorial embellishment. But Lance clearly is not such a journalist, despite the fact that -- as he ever-so-subtly reminds us in his introduction -- he's won a bunch of Emmys. He doesn't actually have the dirt, but he can trash-talk with the best of them. (Fans of Survivor I's "queen bitch" Susan Hawk will probably find much to like about this approach.) By the time I finished reading about Lance's "search for 'Rosebud' in this investigation" and cleaning the vomit off my carpet, I had a new appreciation for the lengths to which some people will go to make a lot of money. And I'm *not* talking about Richard Hatch.
    12 people found this helpful
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