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).
Though the author’s prose is occasionally overworked, the book is a moving example of resilience and healing in the face of racial, sexual, and familial trauma.Ī poignantly told memoir about a life fiercely lived. Habib found a LGBTQ–centered mosque, created a queer Muslim portrait project, and accepted invitations to speak all over the world. Triumphantly, the narrative culminates in scenes of a life full of purpose, power, and belonging. Religious and secular readers alike will be touched by the way Habib’s faith has been strengthened, rather than undermined, by Islamophobia as well as by the compassion and candor with which she examines her complex filial relationships. She started by bravely defying her forced union, which propelled her on a challenging, revelatory journey to return to her queerness, faith, and family (biological and chosen). They were to be avoided at all times, like attack dogs without muzzles.” After desperation drove Habib to attempt suicide, her survival pushed her to emerge from under the patriarchal, homophobic expectations of both her culture of origin and the broader Western culture within which she matured.
Masking her feelings also proved useful when her family sought asylum in Canada and “traded one set of anxieties for another.” There, the author endured racist bullying, growing alienation from her family, and the despair of her arranged marriage at 16: “Getting to know men was not something the women in my family were encouraged to do. Hiding also provided tenuous safety for her Ahmadi Muslim family amid growing state and extremist violence against the religious minority. In her debut, writer, photographer, and activist Habib begins with her childhood in Pakistan, where she learned the protective value of hiding, which insulated her from public stigma (and her mother’s private devastation) after Habib survived child sexual abuse at age 4. A queer Muslim woman recounts her emotional, sexual, and spiritual unfurling.
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