Walk into a bookstore and you can hardly count all the authors who want to tell you how to live. But enough is enough. In this hour of To the Best of Our Knowledge, David Shaw talks back to those he calls "the pleasure police." And Richard Klein says "Go ahead. Eat Fat." Also what to do when you really need advice.

SEGMENT 1

David Shaw , author of "The Pleasure Police: How Bluenose Busybodies and Lilly-livered Alarmists Are Taking All the Fun out of Life," tells Jim Fleming that going out to dinner is more enjoyable than dangerous and that the food and fitness gurus ought to lighten up. Also, Richard Klein tells Steve Paulson about his post-modern diet book, "Eat Fat," which details changing cultural attitudes toward obesity and tours the world of "fat sex."

SEGMENT 2:

Psychologist and psychotherapist Harriet Lerner, PhD. tells Steve Paulson that women become the targets of the advice industry because they're so good at guilt. Lerner practices at the Menninger Clinic in Topeka, and is the author of "Life Preservers" as well as an earlier trilogy of self-help books - "The Dance of Anger," "The Dance of Intimacy," and "The Dance of Deception."

SEGMENT 3:

Best-selling writer Alix Kate Shulman chronicles her summers of solitude on an isolated island off the coast of Maine in her book "Drinking the Rain," and in this conversation with Judith Strasser.

Distribution dates:

• week of 02/09/97 - hour 3
• week of 11/30/97 - hour 1