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).
He fires some shots at the Patriot Act and takes us on a tour of his favorite shops, among them Square Books in Oxford, Miss., and City Lights in San Francisco.Ī leisurely stroll with a knowledgeable but unpretentious companion through some very interesting aisles. Buzbee offers a strong chapter in praise of free-speech-loving booksellers, with special attention to the Salman Rushdie case and the publication of Ulysses. Nor does he think e-books or print-on-demand texts will ever replace the familiar paperback. He acknowledges that Amazon, et al., have wounded the bricks-and-mortar stores, but he does not foresee a time when there are no traditional shops. Dalton and Waldenbooks arrived in 1969), the meaning of the ISBN, the importance of used-book dealers, the rise of online bookselling. (We learn that books used to be displayed horizontally, not vertically, on shelves.) The author teaches us, as well, about the emergence of the superstore (both B. He rehearses the story of the great library at Alexandria, the invention and modifications of the printing press, the rise of the bookshop and its frequent neighbor, the coffeehouse. The early pages are principally memoir, but about halfway through, Buzbee begins to interweave lengthy sections on the history of books and bookselling. The author came from a family with only mild interest in books ( Reader’s Digest Condensed Books lined some of the shelves), and it was not until he read The Grapes of Wrath in high school that his addiction began.
Buzbee, who began his long tenure in the book business as a teenaged clerk at a now-defunct shop called the Upstart Crow, and who has subsequently published fiction ( Fliegelman’s Desire, 1990, not reviewed), is an amiable guide.
Reading this gentle memoir/history is itself a bit like browsing in a friendly bookshop. A proud and unrepentant biblio-addict explains how he got that way-and how books and bookstores have evolved, as well.
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