![]() ![]() If they are not, it’s a brilliant satire.Įlie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children. If the authors are serious, this is a silly, distasteful book. To ask why this is so would be a far more useful project. The world may be like this at times, but often it isn’t. We are told, for instance, to “be conspicuous at all cost,” then told to “behave like others.” More seriously, Greene never really defines “power,” and he merely asserts, rather than offers evidence for, the Hobbesian world of all against all in which he insists we live. While compelling in the way an auto accident might be, the book is simply nonsense. ![]() Quotations in the margins amplify the lesson being taught. Each chapter is conveniently broken down into sections on what happened to those who transgressed or observed the particular law, the key elements in this law, and ways to defensively reverse this law when it’s used against you. 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). Two-thirds of the way through, a surprise-the story of the death of Casey Sheehan, son of antiwar activist Cindy Sheehan.Ī horrifying story, clearly told, though some readers may regret that the author stays so far in the background that she is nearly invisible. Her message appears to be that we are asking some sweet young people to do some awful things. She shows us what the wives were doing back at Fort Hood, reveals how some of them received the awful news that a husband had fallen. She tells their backstories, describes their experiences in high school, their marriages, their parents. Raddatz’s principal interest is in the human beings caught up in the war. She doesn’t shy away from gore, either: After a battle, soldiers clean from vehicles the remains of their comrades’ brains, “soft and slippery and horrifying.” She was able to coax intimate revelations from combatants, their officers, their families she makes use of this material in italicized passages that voice the players’ thoughts. Raddatz is comfortable writing about high-tech weapons and the intricacies of urban warfare. The author whisks us rapidly from Iraq to Texas to Alabama and frequently shifts her lens from the killing zone to the home front and back. ![]() soldiers caught in a deadly 2004 ambush in Sadr City that the author believes marked a turning point, when the war’s mission shifted from peacekeeping and nation-building to battling an insurgency.ĪBC News Chief White House correspondent Raddatz, who has reported frequently from Iraq, displays a compassionate heart in her first book, which is also notable for its cinematic narrative structure. ![]()
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