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). Informative and entertaining, full of vivid stories that reveal not only what women were doing but how they felt about it. Their retreat to the home in the ’50s, the subsequent sexual revolution, and the rise of feminism may be more familiar dramas than the earlier history, but the details are no less absorbing.
Collins shows how women, kept out of the workplace during the Depression, were brought into it by necessity during WWII. The roles they played in the temperance, abolition, and suffrage movements, the effects of the Civil War on southern women, white and black, the lives of 19th-century immigrant women are all explored. Collins fills her pages with fascinating details of everyday life over four centuries, including how women dressed, managed personal hygiene, and raised children. Juliette Brier, who walked 100 miles through Death Valley carrying one child on her back and another in her arms while leading a third, epitomizes the endurance and spirit of pioneer women. During the Revolution, some donned men’s clothing and joined the army, but more traveled with their soldier husbands, doing the cooking and washing, or stayed home and ran the family farm. In an anecdote-laden text often relying on diaries and other contemporary records, she recounts how colonial women were not just housewives, midwives, and innkeepers, but religious dissidents (Anne Hutchinson) and Indian fighters (Hannah Dustin). Her central theme is “the tension between the yearning to create a home and the urge to get out of it.” Both sexes, she states, have accepted mixed messages about women’s proper role, and our history is full of about-faces on the subject. New York Times editorial page editor Collins ( Scorpion Tongues, 1998) has turned a veritable mountain of research into an exceptionally readable, lively account of the contradictions and conflicts that have shaped women’s roles in the US. Illuminating cultural history of American women from the first colonists to the present day.
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