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). Witty and wise a true candidate for the All-Time Desert Island Top 5 Books About Pop Music. This is a lightly-handled, skillful and sincere celebration of pop, of love, sad songs, bad songs and the long, nearly unbearable ache of being a young widower. While eulogizing the punk awesomeness of Renée, Sheffield also throws in a surprisingly heartfelt eulogy for the unsung ’90s, “an open, free time of possibilities, changes we thought were permanent,” before radio lost its last vestige of non-homogenization, and Pavement was the greatest band of all time.
Renée would take them driving for hours on southern roads just so they could sing along to songs on the radio, while Sheffield was the kind of guy who made mix tapes to do the dishes to. Even though Sheffield was a geeky Irish Catholic music obsessive from Boston and Renée was a “real cool hell-raising Appalachian punk-rock girl” who was raised Southern Baptist, “rooted for the Atlanta Braves and sewed her own silver vinyl pants,” when the two met in Charlottesville, they clicked. In this touching and frequently hilarious book, Sheffield structures each of the 15 chapters around a different mix tape, most of which relate in some way to his wife, Renée, who died of a sudden pulmonary embolism in 1997, after they'd been married for five years. Like any true music obsessive, Sheffield-a contributing editor at Rolling Stone, where he writes the “Pop Life” column-has a vast back catalog of mix tapes, either self-made or given as gifts. A rock critic tells about the love of life via a series of 15 mix tapes full to bursting with songs of passion, regret and bad rhyme schemes.
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