WHAT YOUR MOTHER COULDN'T TELL YOU AND YOUR FATHER DIDN'T KNOW

Gray (Men Are from Mars, Women Are from Venus, not reviewed) offers more of what he calls ``advanced relationship skills,'' a delightful term that says all that need be said about the author's hyper-instrumental, connect-the-dots approach to thinking about human relationships. Pull-quotes—perhaps indicating that not even Gray expects people to actually read the rest of the text—appear on nearly every page: ``Men must learn to use their ancient hunting skills of silently watching and waiting when listening to their mates'' or ``Fire gazing is the most ancient and potent of male stress relievers; when men today stare into the TV, they are, in effect, mindlessly looking into the fire.'' (This raises the question of whether there were beer commercials in Peking Man's first barbecue.) Gray does cover some of the same turf that Deborah Tannen does about differences between the way men and women speak and listen. And it's not all horse chips and piffle. But there comes a point when it's reasonable to ask whether all those horrid Greek myths full of rage and dismemberment and blindness weren't a better way to think about relations between the sexes than self- help books. (First printing of 500,000; first serial to Cosmopolitan; Literary Guild split main selection; $350,000 ad/promo; author tour)