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). When they finally leave her in a facility, she wonders: “What crime have we perpetrated, bringing her to this terrible place?” Less effective are summaries of discussions about dementia with an administrator of the facility.Ī graceful and loving meditation on the inevitability of decline, on the wonder of memory. Most affecting are Grant’s accounts of her wrenching decision to institutionalize her mother. Simpson trial, grieves at the death of Princess Di, and retains her tasteful fashion sense. She remembers being embarrassed and disgusted by her father (who sold supplies to hairdressers) she regrets not paying attention in her youth to the family stories of her elders she recalls with bemusement her father’s sudden confession of an encounter with a prostitute-and her mother’s placid acceptance (he had given her earrings to soften the news, and jewelry “easily outweighed a sexual infidelity”) she realizes the wisdom of a friend’s comment that “Your mother has become your daughter.” Even in the darkness of her disease, Rose continues to surprise Grant: she follows the O.J. Grant, a wonderful writer, has assembled many touching episodes, many remarkable observations. Grant chronicles the struggles that she and her sister go through to care for their mother, first in her own apartment and then, finally, in a custodial home. Rose suffers from MID (Multi-Infarct Dementia), a disease characterized by continual minor strokes that, in her case, have destroyed her short-term memory.
#Remind me who i am update
A brief Afterword contains an update on her mother’s continuing decline. Grant divides her text into 27 unnumbered sections, beginning with a nightmarish shopping excursion with her mother Rose to buy a dress for a family wedding in 1996, and ending with a lyrical paean to memory (“the Wandering Jew of our physical selves”). British journalist and novelist Grant ( Sexing the Millennium, 1994) fashions a stylish, poignant memoir of her mother’s losing battle with an insidious form of dementia.
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