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). It’s philosophy, literary criticism, and memoir all rolled up into one neat package, and McMurtry’s constant readers will find much pleasure in these pages. (In west Texas, he observes, “Sudden death, particularly death on the highway-as much a part of that culture as football-lodged in people’s memories, whereas about almost everything else they were vague-). So, too, does McMurtry, who touches on issues of his craft (he writes that one of his purposes as a novelist has been to people the empty frontier in which he grew up), the pleasures of reading and collecting books, the lost art of conversation over supper, the aftereffects of heart attacks and urban renewal, and the tricky business of memory. Benjamin never saw a prickly pear in his life, but he had much to say about personal history and storytelling in an age that isn-t much interested in either. Pepper (for which he gives the recipe) at a drive-through diner out on the dry plains of Archer City, the town McMurtry made famous in The Last Picture Show and other novels. In this book-length meditation on the past-his own, that of his ancestors, and that of the corner of west Texas whence they hail-McMurtry works from an unlikely conceit: rereading the work of the German-Jewish literary journalist Walter Benjamin over a lime Dr. Well-known as a Pulitzer-winning novelist (Duane’s Depressed, 1998, etc.), McMurtry turns less often to nonfiction.

An elegiac essay on memory and the power of storytelling by a master of the art.

Walter benjamin at the dairy queen