![]() There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions. 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). “Part of me realizes that I will never really know exactly what I was like before my head injury,” she writes, “but another part of me stubbornly refuses to give up as I try desperately to fit pieces together in an ever-changing life-size puzzle.” There has been progress on many fronts, she writes, but most days are still a struggle. She was baffled by routine, feigned comprehension, was pained by sex-though she did have the saving grace of a fast blossoming of love between mother and children. Meck relates these tortured years of slowly gathering herself together, then dropping a step or two back, with an unmodulated inflection. She tried in vain to mimic other peoples’ actions, and she could not discern the function of a hairbrush or how a drinking cup works. Meck’s narrative, written with the assistance of award-winning journalist de Visé, moves forward in fits and starts for years, she lived in a hazy world, unable to read (she learned along with her sons), falling out of chairs, suffering bouts of dizziness and blackouts, and forgetting faces almost instantaneously, including her husband's and children’s. However, she had full loss of her episodic memory (recollections of specific events from one’s lived experience) and a good portion of her semantic memory (the recollection of facts she had about a 100-word vocabulary and was confounded by a fork), and her procedural memory was about as developed as a reptile’s. Meck slipped into a coma, and the family prepared for her passing, but she pulled through. She passed out, and the paramedic’s penlight showed one dilated pupil, one shrunk, and no response to pricks to her fingers and toes. Living with her husband, Jim, and their two toddler boys in Texas, the author’s life changed dramatically in 1988 when a ceiling fan fell on her head. Meck cobbles together fragments of her life after a traumatic brain injury.
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