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). The team at OpenRoad obviously devoted good effort to making this a stable, nearly un-crashable e-book.Ĭompared to the current paperback edition of the book, the enhanced e-book edition is a bargain, and a very well-made and well-organized artifact indeed. Tap on the illustrations, and they fill the screen readers may wish only that there were more of them. Otherwise, the enhanced version contains the canonical text of the book, with its thorough index and hot-linked words in text that lead, without difficulty, to the extensive back-of-book notes, from which it is easy to navigate back to the main text. In video clips throughout, Gleick-who introduces himself as a journalist, not a scientist-offers brief updates on developments since the original publication. But 25 years is a couple of lifetimes in science, and there this lively enhanced e-book comes in. That is in large part due to the success of Gleick’s book, which made the so-called Butterfly Effect a household term.

Twenty-five years ago, a young Harvard liberal-arts graduate named James Gleick, then working for the New York Times, became fascinated by an emerging body of science that examined the world not as an orderly chain of being but as a complex, scarcely predictable, sometimes scarcely comprehensible mess of events.Ī quarter-century-and a few stock-market crashes, the fall of empires and the decline of civilizations-later, the idea of a chaotic world is commonplace.

Chaos james gleick book