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).

Their five-day “Woofabago” adventure across America not only restored their faith in humanity, but also reaffirmed the already deep bonds that existed between them and their beloved four-legged friends. With the help of nine equally dog-crazy volunteers and “three GPSs to make it foolproof,” they loaded up three RVs with 25 dogs and set out for the East Coast. It came instead from the move Rosenfelt and Myers decided to make from California to Maine, the story of which the author interweaves into the narrative of his experiences as a canine foster parent. Their most difficult challenge as a “family” didn’t come from illness or death, however. Yet amazingly, each was able to find acceptance in the loud, hairy pack they formed. Each of the 25 they took in had a unique personality. But Rosenfelt focuses primarily on the dogs he and Myers adopted. Over the years, they would rescue thousands of animals that otherwise would have been euthanized. As the pair entered into full-blown “dog lunacy,” the number of dogs they rescued reached, at its height, 42. After Tara died, the two decided to honor her memory by working as dog-shelter volunteers and then by starting their own rescue group. As Rosenfelt’s relationship with Myers developed, so did his interest in dogs. Myers was already an avid dog lover who lived with a golden retriever named Tara. When Rosenfelt ( Leader of the Pack, 2012, etc.) met Debbie Myers, the woman who became his second wife, he never imagined that they would go on to become partners in both life and dog rescuing. A mystery novelist’s account of how he became a dog rescuer and moved cross-country with his “very unusual, very large, very hairy family” of eccentric canines.

Dogtripping by David Rosenfelt