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).
Sometimes stiff, but more often rewarding. With copious notes and an extensive bibliography, Miller provides an exhaustive picture of the life of a craftswoman in colonial times, though readers with only a casual interest in the subject may find it long-winded and digressive. For example, we get a look at conditions in an English prison where captured American sailors, including her second and third husbands, were held during the war at controversies within the Philadelphia Friends meeting, which had expelled the young upholsterer for marrying outside the fold and at the Philadelphia yellow fever epidemic of 1793, in which she lost her father and her sister. Ross’s circle of relatives and acquaintances gives the author plenty of fodder for a survey of the changes in politics, religion, domestic life, social customs and economic trends of the time.
She covers Ross’s Quaker upbringing, her apprenticeship in the trade she would follow all her life, her three marriages, the impact of the Revolution on daily life and the growth of the young republic. With so little evidence for Ross’s main claim to fame, Miller digs into colonial and early federal history to examine the life of a working-class woman of the era. The documentary record shows only that Ross, who earned her living as an upholsterer, was one of several Philadelphians paid by the Continental Congress to make flags for the American forces during the Revolution. In fact, the story of George Washington’s visit to Betsy Ross (1752–1836), in which she showed him that five-pointed stars were easier to make than the six-pointed ones he wanted, is impossible to verify. of Massachusetts, Amherst) paints a detailed portrait of the woman credited with the creation of the Stars and Stripes. A full-length biography of an American icon.
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