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). Nearly two decades and 30 surgical procedures later, Grealy finally stops waiting for her life to begin and comes to terms with her face-her ``self.'' An unsentimental, honest, unflinching look at a single visage reflected (or distorted) in an unforgiving cultural mirror. Now an award-winning poet and essayist (a short version of her tale originally appeared in Harper's and received a National Magazine Award), Grealy's tale ends not with magical deliverance, but with hard-won self-acceptance. Eventually, as she grows up, she finds solace and inspiration in the company of horses and other animals, and as a young adult, she cultivates an enriching inner life through reading, and later writing. And somehow I transformed that blanket into a tent, beneath which I almost happily set up camp.'' Still a young girl, she must cope not only with her own fear but with the awkwardly expressed fears of her parents as well. She writes, ``I felt as if my illness were a blanket the world had thrown over me.

Once a buoyant, sociable tomboy, Grealy, through her suffering, becomes isolated-finding human comfort mainly among the patients she meets in her numerous hospital stays. A gracefully written account of one woman's physical and spiritual struggle to surmount childhood cancer, permanent disfigurement, and, ultimately, ``the deep bottomless grief.called ugliness.'' After surviving relentless medical horrors-the removal at age nine of half her jaw due to Ewing Sarcoma, two and a half years of chemotherapy, and two years of reconstructive surgery-Grealy's true battle begins when she looks in the mirror and finds herself trapped behind a face, in a ``self'' that she hates, and for which her peers cruelly punish her.

Autobiography of a face by lucy grealy