4/11/2023 0 Comments Storm in the night book![]() He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. If they are not, it’s a brilliant satire.Įlie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children. If the authors are serious, this is a silly, distasteful book. ![]() To ask why this is so would be a far more useful project. The world may be like this at times, but often it isn’t. We are told, for instance, to “be conspicuous at all cost,” then told to “behave like others.” More seriously, Greene never really defines “power,” and he merely asserts, rather than offers evidence for, the Hobbesian world of all against all in which he insists we live. While compelling in the way an auto accident might be, the book is simply nonsense. Quotations in the margins amplify the lesson being taught. Each chapter is conveniently broken down into sections on what happened to those who transgressed or observed the particular law, the key elements in this law, and ways to defensively reverse this law when it’s used against you. 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). Kander’s advice is urgent and relevant: “Either you deal with your trauma, or your trauma deals with you.Ī heartfelt message borne of pain and true sacrifice. With the support of therapists and the Veterans Community Project, both the author and his wife came to understand that his dangerous, terrifying experiences in Afghanistan-interviewing men who might kill him or whom he might have to kill-were no less traumatic than physical combat. Interwoven with Kander’s narrative are reflections by his wife, who suffered sadness, frustration, and isolation. By the time he sought help, he was thinking of suicide. After he returned from Afghanistan, where he had been assigned to intelligence-gathering, he was overwhelmed by debilitating symptoms: night terrors, paranoid fear that someone would harm him or his family, volatile anger, and “unrelenting guilt and punishing shame” because he had not been involved in direct combat. However, as he reveals in a forthright chronicle of intensifying mental illness, years of undiagnosed PTSD sent him plummeting to a nadir of self-hatred. As he rose in stature, he was urged-including by Barack Obama-to enter the 2020 presidential race. Involved in ethics reform and voting rights, he founded the nonprofit Let America Vote. He won a seat in the Missouri House of Representatives, was elected as Missouri’s Secretary of State, and was narrowly defeated for the U.S. “Every day I was a soldier,” he writes, “was a day I woke up and I knew exactly what I was doing and why I was doing it.” He strived to regain that sense of purpose in politics. For him, being a soldier was “the truest test of manhood,” giving him both a sense of purpose and order. In his 2018 memoir, Outside the Wire, Kander shared lessons in courage he learned from serving in the ROTC, the Maryland National Guard, and as an officer during a deployment in Afghanistan from October 2006 to February 2007.
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