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).

Not simply the story of a disease, but of the flawed, complex, intelligent people whose lives it transformed. As my mother changed, I changed too, forced to reconsider my own identity as a daughter and as an adult and to recreate my relationship with my mother.”

“I created this book,” Leavitt writes in the introduction, “to remember her as she was before she got sick, but also to remember her as she was during her illness, the ways in which she was transformed and the ways in which parts of her endured. In her first book, Canadian writer and cartoonist Leavitt shows her mother agreeing to have her experiences with the disease documented because “aybe this will help other families!” And likely it will, letting those experiencing the dementia of someone they love know what to expect, and to reassure that the tangled emotions they feel in response-anger, frustration, devotion, humor-are inevitable. Though this is primarily an account of the author’s experiences as her mother becomes all but emotionally unrecognizable, it is also a narrative spanning two generations of complicated family dynamics. Leavitt illustrates significant differences between her mother’s closeness with her sisters and how the disease affects those relationships, and the contrasting tension between the author and her sister. It shows the strains that Alzheimer’s puts on everything-from the sufferer’s well being and sense of purpose to a loving marriage to the physical demands of caring for someone who can no longer care for herself. The narrative is human, honest, loving and occasionally even funny. The power of this graphic memoir is not that its story about a family dealing with Alzheimer’s is so extraordinary, but that it has become so ordinary.

Tangles by Sarah Leavitt