Each chapter is conveniently broken down into sections on what happened to those who transgressed or observed the particular law, the key elements in this law, and ways to defensively reverse this law when it’s used against you. 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). Yet her life’s amazing outcome goes a long way to justify her appealingly inspirational conclusion that maybe anything is possible.

Today the erstwhile child prostitute and crack addict is an attorney for a major national law firm.īrown’s relentless litany of crimes and cruelties tests readers’ endurance and at times makes it impossible to empathize with her younger self. The chapters describing this metamorphosis are delivered in the hosanna-drenched, homily-sprinkled style common among 12-steppers, who never seem to hold God responsible for their travails but invariably credit Him with their salvation. At 25, Brown woke up behind a Dumpster and embarked on a period of detox and recovery. She discovered a sense of family in the notorious Crips street gang, but after she was temporarily paralyzed at age 15 as the result of a drive-by shooting, Brown gave up “banging.” That didn’t much slow her descent into extreme drug abuse, serial abortions and domestic violence. She was routinely abused by her sadistic foster mother, yet no matter how many times she escaped, the perversely ineffectual legal system insisted on returning her to her tormentor.

On her second night in a foster home, Brown was raped on the bathroom floor. Everything plunged downhill from there, as Brown relates in a narrative couched in street slang interspersed with interior monologues (literary devices that the author at times fails to pull off). Harrowing, earnest autobiography takes readers on a tour from incomprehensible evil through unexpected kindness to eventual triumph.īrown’s story begins in January 1976, when, at age 11, she discovered the body of her mother, dead from a seizure, on the bedroom floor of their home in a San Diego ghetto.

A piece of cupcake book