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). Powerful, funny, and moving: an effortless series of incidents full of droll wisdom. All the while, his ambiguous origins (even as a child he is known by two names) mark him, as such things do in small communities.
From success in school exams and the start of a civil-service career (which represents as much success as he and his family could ever reasonably expect), Leonard struggles forward via tiny, hilarious, amateur provincial theater groups, drunk on whatever writer he is reading at the moment. ("I'm Protestant,'' says one promising lass, having deduced his Catholicism, and walks off with a smile another girl's dying father struggles out of bed to investigate.) The bedrock is Leonard's long, hard, Horatio Alger climb from the ultimate obscurity of unwanted bastardy. His mother's periodic alcoholism (coinciding with the Christmas season) is a powerful, fully faced moment, and the dogged pursuit of sexual congress is an ongoing obbligato that evokes Dylan Thomas and a world long gone. (Priests especially rouse him to outstanding efforts.) Irony and farce are everywhere, along with a calm, unblinking acceptance of human nature. Like Flann O'Brien, he writes about the town of Dalkey a great deal, often with a marvelous sense of humor. Leonard writes with an elegant Irish accent, and his evocation of place is uncanny.
Strong, original, wrenching account of growing up out of wedlock in a small Irish town, by memoirist ( Home Before Night, 1980) and playwright (Da) Leonard.
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