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). Your heart will grow down into and back out of that ground like a tree.”Ī profound and inspiring love letter to one piece of Earth-and to the rest of it, as well. You will never be alone in the same way again, and never quite dislocated.

“I am celebrating because how in the face of this earth could I not?” By the end of the book, she has been through it all-fires, blizzards, murdered animals, and more-and we understand when she writes, “when you give yourself wholly to a piece of ground, its goodness enters your bloodstream like an infusion. “I am celebrating because this magnificent rock we live on demands celebration,” she writes. Writing in the face of climate change, she refuses to shrink.

“Ranch Archive,” which mostly recounts the history of the ranch itself, is the least engaging piece, but the rest are excellent, as the author enthuses readers through her prose and attitude alike. The author’s affinity for the place is clearly powerful-and infectious for readers. “Did I ask myself whether putting 5 percent down on a 120-acre ranch I had no idea how to take care of and no foreseeable way to pay for might have been taking the idea of retethering to the earth to a radical extreme? I did not,” she writes, continuing, “if buying the ranch was a gross overreaction to either my mother’s death or my book’s unexpected turn, it was a secret I kept from myself.” Of course, the author made it work, and the ranch served as a connecting point between seasonal teaching and her many travels. Her nonfiction persona, like many of her fictional narrators, is tough and full of gumption. of California, Davis Contents May Have Shifted, 2012, etc.) writes with the same unvarnished, truth-loaded sentences that made her short story collection Cowboys Are My Weakness (1992) a contemporary classic. A collection of essays about finding and maintaining one’s place on our changing planet.

Deep creek memoir