![]() ![]() ![]() 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). (b&w photos, not seen) (Book- of-the-Month Club selection) as an appropriate heading, such as “murder,” “lunatic,” “polymath” (“a person of much or varied learning”) and, eventually, “acknowledgment.” First-rate writing: well-crafted, incisive, abundantly playful. The author begins each chapter with an entry from the original O.E.D. In praising the achievement of the work, Winchester rejoices, “It wears its status with a magisterial self-assurance, not least by giving its half million definitions a robustly Victorian certitude of tone.” Winchester’s own tone and his prose are wonderfully Victorian, an apt mirror for his subject. All those Dictionary slips,- opines Winchester, -were medication, became his therapy.- When he describes the original O.E.D.’s “twelve tombstone-sized volumes,” we get a whiff of the grueling mental task exacted from its servants by the work, reminiscent of the labors involved in Melville’s classic “Bartleby the Scrivener”-in a book that is similarly a psychological masterwork. Latterly ailing (and sexually repressed), he clung to his lexicographic efforts for dear life and the sake of his sanity-or what remained of it. Minor, apparently a paranoiac killer, had committed murder in 1872 to his lasting travail, he-d witnessed atrocities in the American Civil War. William Chester Minor, was incarcerated for life in an asylum for the criminally insane. editor Professor James Murray headed off to meet a major contributor (of more than 10,000 entries) to his epochal reference work, he discovered that this distinguished philologist, Dr. His account is studded with odd persons and unexpected drama. Manchester Guardian journalist Winchester (The River at the Center of the World, 1996 Pacific Rising, 1991) turns from Asia toward that most British of topics: the Oxford English Dictionary. Remarkably readable, this chronicle of lexicography roams from the great dictionary itself to hidden nooks in the human psyche that sometimes house the motives for murder, the sources for sanity, and the blueprint for creativity. ![]()
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