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). Mohammed creates a tense narrative of her desperate flight, the efforts of her powerful father to stop her, and the determined journalist who came to her aid. Longing for freedom, she found an online network of Saudi women runaways who helped her plan an escape. She watched films and read forbidden books on her phone.
Even at a medical appointment, “when the doctor would ask me questions about why I was there or what was wrong, my father or my brother would answer and explain to him what I was feeling.” A rebellious young woman, Mohammed boldly questioned her teachers, enjoined her younger brother to accompany her to the homes of more liberal relatives, and stealthily managed to circumvent some restrictions: She first had sex with a girl when she was 12 and later with a boy whom she smuggled into her huge, multiroom house. “Going outside without my niqab covering my face was an offence that called for severe punishment,” she writes, “and that’s what they delivered to me with fists and kicks and slaps.” She could do nothing, and go nowhere, without her father’s or brothers’ permission. In a stark memoir related in shocking detail to Canadian journalist and human rights activist Armstrong, Mohammed recounts growing up under Saudi Arabia’s repressive male guardianship system in which “legally, a woman is a nullity.” Raised in an elite Sunni family, she was taught the severely puritanical Wahhabi version of Islam, “a strict, harsh, unforgiving and repressive doctrine driven by coercion and fear.” When she was 7, her mother warned her she must always be quiet, submissive, and pious from the age of 9, she had to wear an abaya, a loose, shapeless, black garment that covered her whole body and at 12, she had to add a niqab, a mask that exposes only the eyes. A harrowing account of a Saudi woman’s triumph over oppression.
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