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). When Al-Joundi keeps that promise, the result is a series of staggeringly cruel betrayals, described in prose that is beautifully taut and relentlessly unemotional.Ī pitiless, steely narrative, alternately heartbreaking and compelling. The book begins with her father making her promise that at his funeral no one will read from the Koran, but play Nina Simone’s “Sinnerman” instead. You may drink, go out, lose your virginity, but…in my house I don’t ever want to see anyone pray or fast.” The story also widens to take in the scope of the larger cultural moment: the family’s exile in Baghdad and return to Beirut, Al-Joundi’s drug addiction and the years of anonymous sex, the cruelty of war and the omnipresence of death seen through the eyes of a precocious young woman rendered entirely unfit for the world she inhabited. Offer it to men as much as you want, but not to the good Lord. He taught her that bras were symbols of oppression, bribed her into giving up a fledgling effort to keep Ramadan with a shot of whiskey and celebrated her growing sexual promiscuity, offering the scandalous paternal dictum: “never offer your ass up to the sky. She was raised by an irreverent, politically outspoken and determinedly secular intellectual father, who, on his daughter’s eighth birthday, got her drunk on a good bottle of Bordeaux. The story of one woman’s reckless and liberated adolescence in the brutal atmosphere of 1970s and ’80s Beirut.Īl-Joundi’s upbringing was unusual.
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