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). Writing about everything from The Chronicles of Narnia to Where the Wild Things Are to The Tale of Peter Rabbit, the author demonstrates a deep love of children’s literature and a keen understanding of the ways in which reapproaching beloved texts can highlight the connections and differences between a child’s perception and adult reality.Īs well-researched as it is seamlessly composed, this book entertains as it educates. Handy’s candor is one of the book’s most refreshing features, and he invites readers to puzzle through their own complicated thoughts about favorite novels right alongside him. The author expertly employs his experience as an editor and writer, mingling personal anecdotes with literary history and social commentary while discussing the enduring popularity of Margaret Wise Brown’s Goodnight Moon or pondering what message Shel Silverstein’s somewhat masochistic The Giving Tree is supposed to teach its young audience. To succeed, the tone must be informative but not pedantic, and Handy nails it, displaying a highly engaging prose style that showcases an impressive ebb and flow of sentence structure and delicate mix of information and entertainment. A book like this is difficult to write and can be even more difficult to find an audience for.

Focusing on books for pre–young adult ages, he observes that adult rereaders of beloved childhood texts cannot engage with the work without acknowledging the mature perspective that adulthood confers thus, they will rediscover the works from a new vantage point.

In his first book, veteran cultural critic Handy, a former writer and editor at both Time and Spy magazines, astutely discusses the central truth about rereading children's books, which is that the experience is equal parts nostalgia and revelation. A Vanity Fair contributing editor encourages adult readers to tumble back down the rabbit hole of childhood and rediscover their favorite books.

Bruce handy wild things