If the authors are serious, this is a silly, distasteful book. To ask why this is so would be a far more useful project. The world may be like this at times, but often it isn’t. We are told, for instance, to “be conspicuous at all cost,” then told to “behave like others.” More seriously, Greene never really defines “power,” and he merely asserts, rather than offers evidence for, the Hobbesian world of all against all in which he insists we live. 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). In the end, though, it all feels a little sad, and Buell has the smarts to know it: “I wanted to make others happy more than I wanted to make myself happy.”
The saving grace is that Buell has a carbonated sense of humor, describing herself as a “quasi-scene-maker pseudocelebrity” and dubbing Steve Tyler (of Aerosmith) “ ‘the poor man’s Mick Jagger’ because of the remarkable resemblance in their lips.” Less lively pages are devoted to her own singing career and life with daughter Liv Tyler. She also has some tender recollections of Mick Jagger (“the first time in my life that I had an orgasm without clitoral stimulation”). Although she does develop a theme along the way, the author is perfectly happy simply to pursue the famous (“I got to see Keith Moon before he died”) or go gaga over John Lennon (“Oh man, if he wasn’t special, then I’m insane”). I wasn’t black and I wasn’t weird”), Jimmy Page (“When he kissed me, he loved to spew his saliva into my mouth”), Rod Stewart (“We really liked each other sexually and had a real fondness for one another”), Elvis Costello (“unbridled and mutually satisfying passion”), and Jack Nicholson (“I was having my first very cool sex-against-the-car-with-Jack Nicholson lesson”). There were, for starters, Todd Rundgren (“incredible sexual energy, we had sex all the time”), David Bowie (“I don’t think I was really his cup of tea sexually. Although she claims that she was never simply questing after sex (and that she felt hurt because “people always wanted to have sex with me, instead of wondering what I thought or felt”), she sure describes it with great gusto here.
Steven tyler and bebe buell series#
A name-dropping memoir (“I had a similar experience with Salvador Dalí”) by the ex-model who became lover and muse to a 30-year stretch of American glitterati.īuell moved to New York in 1972 and began a remarkable series of affairs with rock musicians, fashion photographers, and assorted celebrities.