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). Readers frustrated with the unhealthy, artificial food chain will take heart and inspiration here. Camille, meanwhile, offers anecdotes and recipes.
“I’m unimpressed by arguments that condemn animal harvest,” writes Kingsolver, “while ignoring, wholesale, the animal killing that underwrites vegetal foods.” Elsewhere, Steven explores business topics such as the good economics of going organic the losing battle in the use of pesticides the importance of a restructured Farm Bill mad cow disease and fair trade. The family learned how to make cheese, visited organic farms and a working family farm in Tuscany, even grew and killed their own meat. (In one of biologist Steven’s terrific sidebars, “Oily Food,” he notes that 17 percent of the nation’s energy is consumed by agriculture.) From her vegetable patch, Kingsolver discovered nifty ways to use plentiful available produce such as asparagus, rhubarb, wild mushrooms, honey, zucchini, pumpkins and tomatoes she also spent a lot of time canning summer foods for winter. Kingsolver wants to know where her food is coming from: Her diary records her attempts to consume only those items grown locally and in season while eschewing foods that require the use of fossil fuels for transport, fertilizing and processing. Their aim, she notes, was to “live in a place that could feed us,” to grow their own food and join the increasingly potent movement led by organic growers and small exurban food producers. With some assistance from her husband, Steven, and 19-year-old daughter, Camille, Kingsolver ( Prodigal Summer, 2000, etc.) elegantly chronicles a year of back-to-the-land living with her family in Appalachia.Īfter three years of drought, the author decamped from her longtime home in Arizona and set out with Steven, Camille and younger daughter Lily to inhabit fulltime his family’s farm in Virginia.
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