Stingray : The Lethal Tactics of the Sole Survivor [Paperback]

Peter Lance (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: December 1, 2000

THE STINGRAY is the unauthorized biography of "Survivor" winner Richard Hatch, covering not only his life, his tactics that won him the prize in the CBS-TV show "Survivor," but what happened to him after the show when he finally came to Hollywood for the big payoff. It was a payoff that never happened, the author explains and documents in a Capra-esque story which reveals that even the lethal strategies of a corporate trainer don't match up to the even more lethal tactics of network television. THE STINGRAY also goes behind the scenes on the island to show readers what they, as viewers, never saw.

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

• Paperback: 288 pages
• Publisher: Cinema Twenty One Books (December 1, 2000)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1885840039
• ISBN-13: 978-1885840035
• Product Dimensions: 8.9 x 6 x 0.7 inches
• Shipping Weight: 13.6 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 4.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (31 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #647,618 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

16 of 16 people found the following review helpful:

2.0 out of 5 stars Richard's Revenge, January 3, 2003

By 

sweetmolly (RICHMOND, VA USA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Stingray : The Lethal Tactics of the Sole Survivor (Paperback)

To read this sort of stuff, you really have to be a "Survivor" junkie, and I qualify. I have been with it since the start and don't believe I have missed an episode (though some were eminently missable!).

"The Stingray" came out hoping to capitalize on first "Survivor" winner Richard Hatch's instant fame. The author's big beef is 1) CBS has Survivor cast members so locked up, it's a wonder they can even renew their drivers' license and 2) Richard Hatch "strung him along" and a $500,000 book deal sunk from sight because Richard either was unaware of the lock CBS had on him or thought he could get around it.

Mr. Lance never considers that maybe Richard Hatch was also bummed out about losing $500,000. The book is basically one long whine. Lance constantly reminds us he is a multiple award winning "investigative journalist" and Hatch is well---chopped liver. Richard is a fascinating subject, a man that has reinvented himself more times than you can count, very bright, self-destructive, and some of this information is presented.

Awards aside, this book is atrociously edited and hardly a page goes by without major typos and misspellings. The organization is non-existent. Mr. Lance is much given to "More on THIS later" type statements, only there never is any "more." The author constantly zings Hatch with "you knew how to win a million dollars; but you didn't know what to do after you got it."

Well, now it is two years later. Richard seems to be doing ok, and he has been resurrected as the Prime Survivor. All other Survivors are compared to Richard and found lacking. Latest Survivor winner Brian Haydik, who could probably give a whole new meaning to the phrase "coldly ambitious", is believed to have modeled his strategy on Hatch's game. At the time of Richard's win, he was the man you loved to hate, and Peter Lance sneered that would be his undoing. Not necessarily so. Viewers gradually realized you could be Charley-nice-guy and get booted off the island, or you could Outwit, Outplay, and Out Mean everyone else and come home with a million dollars.

Many of the interviews in this book are second-hand, even at the time the book was printed. I gave the book a second star for the occasional insights into Hatch's character. Otherwise, a waste of time.
-sweetmolly-Amazon Reviewer

13 of 16 people found the following review helpful:

2.0 out of 5 stars Very poorly written; editing nonexistent, May 16, 2001

By 

Book Queen (Valdese, NC USA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Stingray : The Lethal Tactics of the Sole Survivor (Paperback)

It is hard to judge the merits of a book in which typographical errors abound on each page. Worse, the author doesn't know the difference between "elude" and "allude", nor "effect" and "affect." His punctuation is bizarre. Sentence fragments abound.

Clearly, this book was rushed to press to capitalize on Survivor's current popularity.

If you are looking for new information on Survivor, or facts and the life history of Richard Hatch, look elsewhere. Throughout the book, the author repeatedly says "more on that later" or "we'll get to that soon" -- yet never does.

I'm glad I borrowed this book from a friend and didn't pay my own cold hard cash for it.

12 of 15 people found the following review helpful:

1.0 out of 5 stars "Hatch"et job, March 7, 2001

By 

Ethan Straffin (Palo Alto, CA USA) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

Amazon Verified Purchase

This review is from: Stingray : The Lethal Tactics of the Sole Survivor (Paperback)

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.