This Book Review originally appeared in Post & Courier, June 26, 2005

HARD SELL: The Evolution of a Viagra Salesman. By Jamie Reidy. Andrews McMeel Publishing. 210 pages. $19.95.

Here’s a book reminiscent of the pro sports tell-alls of the 1970s: smooth talking, all-nighters in the bar, and a steady cash flow pouring in despite the protagonist bucking the system every chance he gets.  Jamie Reidy might like the analogy.  By his own admission, he spent more time talking football with docs when making sales calls for Pfizer than he did actually discussing their products.

Despite a brief discussion in the beginning, however, Viagra, the magical blue pill that sent pharmaceutical sales head over hills, doesn’t make its appearance until well past the middle of the book.

“Hard Sell” is an irreverent, occasionally hilarious, look at pharmaceutical sales.  Reidy describes a world in which voice-mail and strategically timed receipts are used as smoke-and-mirrors for reps to appear industrious for managers even while they are sleeping in or slipping away on a Friday afternoon for an early start on the weekend.

Insider knowledge of the strange interrelationship and sometimes competing interests of pharmaceutical manufacturers, marketers, physicians, nurses, and patients makes this book quite illuminating.  The common practice of “tab cutting,” – for example, writing a prescription for 100-milligram tablets and telling the patient to cut each pill in half to make two 50-milligram doses - is discussed.  This is done to save the patient money.  “Nothing,” he writes, “makes pharmaceutical sales people crazier than news of ‘tab cutting.”  He elaborates on the solution: “In addition to being aesthetically pleasing, Viagra’s unique diamond shape was intended to make it impossible to fit the tablet inside a pill cutter, and, at the very least, extremely difficult to cut it manually with a knife.”

Other anecdotes (refilling cabinets with free samples, buying lunches for office staff, negotiating with the head nurse) keep the book entertaining and eye-opening.

Reidy, no surprise, no longer works for Pfizer.  In launching his new literary career, though, he provides a comic expose of the unseen world between the shiny new Viagra pen and the prescription pad.  

Reviewer Jason A. Zwiker is a freelance writer in Charleston.

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