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). Through “coronal planes,” sutras and savasanas, from downward dog to lotus poses, Dederer contributes nuggets of yoga trivia paired with a droll, self-effacing delivery that’s both down-to-earth and pleasingly introspective.ĭelicious fun with a friendly nudge for readers on the fence about yoga. The author’s parents are legally married, yet her mother has had a boyfriend for 25 years, and her brother is a former alternative-rock musician turned public-relations guru who insists that his parents get divorced. Dederer’s bittersweet childhood and adult life is consistently engrossing and never becomes overshadowed by an eccentric family (though there’s great potential). The family’s big move to Colorado offered a cleansing breath of fresh air. Her three best friends-a new mother with bohemian ideals, a risk-taking young mother and a childless artist-provided support through the writer’s episodes of insecurity, the birth of her second child and a hilarious one-time attempt at pregnancy yoga (“nine ladies lying on the floor in a sunny room, farting”). Though some of the poses, Dederer wryly admits, seemed “porny,” and she digested its spiritual and metaphysical aspects with “an agnostic’s indifference,” the ten years that followed were transformational.
Raising her daughter with her intermittently distant husband, also a writer, in a white, liberal, “well-intentioned” Seattle neighborhood proffered its own set of challenges, so she embraced yoga as part of a self-betterment project. She thought the exercise regimen was tailor-made only for “white people seeking transformation,” but when her back seized after lifting her newborn daughter, the many folks recommending yoga didn’t seem so crazy after all. Enjoyable memoir about life and the provocations of childbirth made palatable with yoga poses.Ĭritic and essayist Dederer describes herself as a “self-conscious, hair-adjusting kind of person,” just the type to dismiss yoga and its purported physical- and mental-health benefits.
0 kommentar(er)
