Each law, however, gets its own chapter: “Conceal Your Intentions,” “Always Say Less Than Necessary,” “Pose as a Friend, Work as a Spy,” and so on. These laws boil down to being as ruthless, selfish, manipulative, and deceitful as possible.
This power game can be played well or poorly, and in these 48 laws culled from the history and wisdom of the world’s greatest power players are the rules that must be followed to win. We live today as courtiers once did in royal courts: we must appear civil while attempting to crush all those around us. The authors have created a sort of anti-Book of Virtues in this encyclopedic compendium of the ways and means of power.Įveryone wants power and everyone is in a constant duplicitous game to gain more power at the expense of others, according to Greene, a screenwriter and former editor at Esquire (Elffers, a book packager, designed the volume, with its attractive marginalia).
An impressive, absorbing biography heralded as brilliant by the British press, which will receive strong support here. And the last decades represent a lifetime of long and often losing battles among official, political circles, solitude and invalidism, embattled crusade which was not without its cruelty, until the last years brought with them a softening serenity. Broken in health, and in spirit, she returned to England, haunted by the facts of preventable disease, determined to reform health standards. The apprenticeship which began in the wretchedly squalid hospitals of these times found its apotheosis in the Crimea where she met not only the resentment of the officers and the open freeze of the doctors, but faced the filth of fever ridden barrack hospitals, sickness and starvation, and the overloading of injured men in a calamitous campaign. Here, from the time when she was seventeen and she first knew that she was to give her life to the service of others (for her, as well as Joan of Arc, there were the "voices"), there followed a "secret life of agony and aspiration" until she reached the certainty that she was to nurse the sick, and only sixteen years later achieved that end after a bitter break with her family. For here is no gentle lady of the lamp, but a woman who disregarded her beauty and her wellborn background, who had an amazing aptitude for organization, who avoided all public recognition, whose courage was equalled by a harsh impatience and whose mystic sense of mission was countered by an exaggerated despair. A first authoritative biography of Florence Nightingale which is based on a tremendous amount of new material (from family papers to her own exhaustive "private notes") and which creates a powerful, impassioned portrait.
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