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). By the time that Cohen’s father tells him, “I just can’t get over that people speak to each other this way, in public places,” most readers will agree and likely stop reading.Īnyone except the most devoted Housewives fans will wish that Cohen were less talkative.

In one tortured instance, he reveals how the Bravo team recut all episodes of the Real Housewives of Beverly Hills after a participant’s husband committed suicide, then claims that what they presented on TV was “real life.” The disclosure that the film crew shoots 85 hours of footage for every hour aired gives the lie to the claim that reality TV is any such thing. Cohen is candid, but he will try many readers’ patience with his devotion of several pages to the most mundane details of the Housewives’ fame-mongering: e.g., tweets from their dogs, transcripts of interviews gone awry and defenses of their shallowness that ring-surprise!-hollow. He also effectively captures the fear of coming out in the 1980s, a time when homophobic jokes and AIDS misinformation were rampant. Cohen’s youthful obsession with soap maven Susan Lucci further highlights his eventual lionizing of the Real Housewives, and he sprinkles his awkward encounters with his diva idol throughout the text. In this uneven memoir/gossip fest, Cohen attempts to strike a balance between the story of his upbringing in a close-knit Jewish family and dishing on the antics of “Bravolebrities.” In the former, he often succeeds, portraying his parents as warmly and humorously as you would expect from someone who implored his mom to send him updates on All My Children while he was away at camp. The Bravo network executive who green-lighted the Real Housewives franchise shares backstage insights into reality TV.

Most Talkative by Andy Cohen