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). Jenkins’ many Instagram followers won’t be disappointed. The author is especially good at eliciting wisdom, even if sometimes of a loopy kind, from the people he encountered-his traveling companion in particular but also people like a young Argentinian woman who confided that she wants to do a road trip through the U.S.: “I want to see the empire before it falls.' Other moments are more successful, though. His account runs a little long, some of it a mere slideshow of impressions ('Mexico City is a beast” “It was beautiful, the air was clean, the light angled just right”). “I just want you to be free.” Jenkins gets there-to that freedom, that is, and also to Patagonia. “I think that you’re scared, and that’s bullshit,” said his friend after a critical moment that managed to touch on most of these points. In the company of an adventurous friend, Jenkins found plenty of occasions for that self-discovery, sifting through the wreckage of family crises, wrestling with sexual identity, and grappling with questions of faith and religious belief.

The trip took 16 months and brought him a built-in audience for this memoir as he posted photographs and observations to social media. “It wasn’t the job that chased me away,” he writes of hitting the 30-year-old mark, “it was mortality.” He adds, meaningfully, that he had plenty of background what remained was to acquire experience, or “background and tools,” with which to live his life henceforth. Granted, his travel was far more challenging than most, as he decided to leave a job and a life that afforded him plenty of satisfactions in order to ride a bicycle from Oregon to the tip of South America. Instagram personality Jenkins works a familiar trope: a challenging season of travel as a means of finding out what makes him tick and working out the big questions. Or, evangelism and the art of bicycle maintenance on a long journey of self-discovery.

To shake your sleeping self