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). As Forché writes in her elegiac opening, “I will learn that the human head weighs about two and a half kilos, and a child’s head, something less.” Episode by episode, dodging death squads, Forché builds a story filled with violence and intrigue worthy of Graham Greene around which a river of blood flows-doing so, unstanched, with the avid support of America’s leaders.Ī valuable firsthand report of a time of terror. Gómez, her Virgil, guided Forché into tight corners, such as the cramped office of a commander who earnestly asked, “what can we do to improve the situation?” Alas, the time for talking drew short, and the bullets began to fly-some of them, it seems, deliberately aimed at her. A bête noire soon came into view: Colonel Chacón, “who chops off fingers and has people disemboweled.” Gómez was a born mansplainer, throwing out a sequence of lessons that prompted Forché to protest that she was smart enough to follow along, to which he replied, “Lesson three has nothing to do with you.” The remark was ominous, to say the least. Gómez convinced Forché that she needed to see what was happening for herself, and off she went to a nation on the brink. At the beginning of the narrative, the author recounts how she opened her door one day to a man whom Alegría had mentioned without much specificity: Leonel Gómez, a mysterious figure who sometimes seemed to be all things to all people. “What I knew of El Salvador, I knew from my Spanish professor in college, himself a Salvadoran,” as well as from translating the work of the poet Claribel Alegría. Blue Hour, 2003, etc.) admits she had only a little knowledge of the Central American nation of El Salvador until the end of the 1970s. A noted poet and activist recounts an odd season at the dawn of the civil war in El Salvador.Īt the opening, Forché (English/Georgetown Univ.

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