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). The author’s romantic entanglements may fail to engage the reader, but she provides a vivid portrait of the currently pervasive culture of casual sex. Though her experience didn’t bring her true love, it provided her with some titillating journalistic material. However, a disastrous sexual liaison at the year’s end indicates that may not have been quite the case.
The author asserts that “while closing myself off physically, I’ve opened up more psychologically,” and that her year without taught her many things about relationships. Men abound in this memoir, some alive and present, others as colorful memories. While shopping for a chaste wardrobe, she muses on what women communicate by what they wear, and a movie date launches her into a discussion of the depiction of sex on the screen, from Hepburn and Tracy in Adam’s Rib to Jennifer Aniston and Vince Vaughn in The Break-Up. While recounting her adventures and misadventures, she philosophizes about sex, dipping into feminist history, psychology and sociology. The story of her venture into a flirty sort of chastity began in July and ended in August of the following year, with most chapters dealing with a single month. Saying no to sex would, she hoped, help her find love. She was spurred to rethink her approach to relationships with men after seeing an ex-boyfriend escorting his girlfriend into a jewelry store. A journalist’s account of her voluntary chastity.Īnderson, a 30ish, single woman about town in London and New York, had always found sex easy but love elusive.
0 kommentar(er)
