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). At times, the author examines his complicated romantic and sexual relationships, and he also delves insightfully into politics, literature, feminism, and injustice, among other topics.Ī dynamic memoir that is unsettling in all the best ways. Far more than just the physical aspect, the weight he carries also derives from the burdens placed on him by a racist society, by his mother and his loving grandmother, and even by himself. Then he got fanatical with exercise and near starvation, dropping down to 170-followed by a relapse of sorts as he began to approach 300 again. Laymon hated himself for topping 300 pounds as a teenager. Of all the secondary themes, the impact of addiction-food, gambling, and drug use, but especially food-ranks next. “Every time you said my particular brand of hardheadedness and white Mississippian’s brutal desire for black suffering were recipes for an early death, institutionalization, or incarceration, I knew you were right,” writes the author. One of the main elements of the memoir is his resentment at white privilege and his techniques to counter it. The relentlessness of his mother’s love-she expected academic and behavioral perfection and employed corporal punishment with a belt-shaped Laymon’s character in ways both obvious and subtle. As an obese black youngster, the author had to learn to absorb cruelty not only because of his size, but also because of his dark skin. He also uses an intriguing narrative form, directly addressing his divorced mother, a poverty-stricken single woman who became a political science professor at Jackson State University. of Mississippi How to Slowly Kill Yourself and Others in America, 2013, etc.) skillfully couches his provocative subject matter in language that is pyrotechnic and unmistakably his own. Laymon (English and Creative Writing/Univ. A challenging memoir about black-white relations, income inequality, mother-son dynamics, Mississippi byways, lack of personal self-control, education from kindergarten through graduate school, and so much more.
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