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). Candid and emotionally complex, Grande’s book celebrates one woman’s tenacity in the face of hardship and heartbreak while offering hope to other immigrants as they “fight to remain” and make their voices heard in a changing America.Ī heartfelt, inspiring, and relevant memoir. Now a single mother but no less determined to succeed on her terms, she earned a place in the Emerging Writers program, where she finally found the creative path she had been seeking all along. She began to make her dream of a middle-class life a reality, but at the expense of her writing. Instead, she floundered, unsure of how to begin her writing career. After graduation, she returned to LA idealistic, believing that a degree would automatically grant her success. When, for example, the mother who had abandoned her sent Grande’s sister back to Mexico for “running wild,” Grande brought the young girl to Santa Cruz only to be profoundly disappointed by her sister's bad behavior.
But the ghosts of her past continued to haunt her.
At first, the author felt out of place on the nearly all-white UCSC campus gradually, she found a place among other Hispanic students and in the university’s creative writing program. By the time Grande left community college for UCSC, her main sources of emotional support were a professor and a boyfriend who had been accepted to another college. Two older siblings had dropped out of college, broken her alcoholic father’s heart, and made him “ up on me.” He had also exiled them from his life to facilitate the return of the second wife he had divorced. When Grande ( The Distance Between Us, 2012, etc.), a former undocumented Mexican immigrant, left Los Angeles in 1996 for the University of California, Santa Cruz, she was both excited and afraid.
An award-winning author’s account of how she became the first person in her family to attend college and live the dream of becoming a writer.
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