``It’s interesting that `Bridges’ was lasting so long as well. ``I think the popularity of `Men are from Mars’ and the spinoff books is basically a sign of the times _ that both men and women are hungry for information to understand each other in a positive way, and that’s what my book deals with,″ he said in an interview. Gray believes the popularity of his book stems both from its accessibility and its timeliness. He is not the first author to successfully tackle issues of how the sexes communicate _ Deborah Tannen, most notably, did so in her best seller ``You Just Don’t Understand.″ But Tannen never was quite the same marketing phenomenon as Gray, possibly because her book was written in a somewhat more academic style, and possibly because she hasn’t made a full-time career out of it. Soon, his boyish visage will be beamed into hotels, up to 2,000 at a time, where acolytes may gather to see and hear his satellite-refracted message of love and hope and connubial bliss. He fills cruise ships for extended seminars on the bounding main. He appears on television talk shows constantly, often in satellite interviews conducted from a studio in San Francisco, not far from his Mill Valley, Calif., home. He conducts seminars of up to eight hours at packed convention halls and auditoriums. He has a home page on the Internet’s World Wide Web. He recently hit the market with a CD-ROM. His message _ that men and women are very different from one another, and must recognize and celebrate their differences _ is packaged in books, on audiotapes and videotapes. He gets his points across by every means available, from one-on-one dialogue to computer-assisted, video-enhanced mass marketing. In a world where new communication opportunities seem to open up every day, where the mere printed page seems somehow quaint, Gray is riding the crest of the new media wave. He more than compensates by combining an entertainer’s charisma with an uncanny ability to tell people precisely where the fault lines lie in their marriages. Never mind that the author has only the most dubious of academic credentials, is scorned by respected gender researchers, and is himself divorced.
As the sun sets on ``The Bridges of Madison County,″ which just dropped off The New York Times best-seller list after 162 weeks, Gray’s megaselling hit about how couples can bridge the interplanetary gulch between the sexes has suddenly become the longest-running best seller in the country. See, people listen to what John Gray has to say. See, when a man is dating you, his affection is really testosterone with manners.″ ``So much of the literature today understands women, but it doesn’t understand men.
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