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). Two-thirds of the way through, a surprise-the story of the death of Casey Sheehan, son of antiwar activist Cindy Sheehan.Ī horrifying story, clearly told, though some readers may regret that the author stays so far in the background that she is nearly invisible. Her message appears to be that we are asking some sweet young people to do some awful things. She shows us what the wives were doing back at Fort Hood, reveals how some of them received the awful news that a husband had fallen. She tells their backstories, describes their experiences in high school, their marriages, their parents. Raddatz’s principal interest is in the human beings caught up in the war. She doesn’t shy away from gore, either: After a battle, soldiers clean from vehicles the remains of their comrades’ brains, “soft and slippery and horrifying.” She was able to coax intimate revelations from combatants, their officers, their families she makes use of this material in italicized passages that voice the players’ thoughts. Raddatz is comfortable writing about high-tech weapons and the intricacies of urban warfare. The author whisks us rapidly from Iraq to Texas to Alabama and frequently shifts her lens from the killing zone to the home front and back. soldiers caught in a deadly 2004 ambush in Sadr City that the author believes marked a turning point, when the war’s mission shifted from peacekeeping and nation-building to battling an insurgency.ĪBC News Chief White House correspondent Raddatz, who has reported frequently from Iraq, displays a compassionate heart in her first book, which is also notable for its cinematic narrative structure. 7 at 9pm on National Geographic.The personal stories of U.S. “Just like the guys that go back and visit France, or Korea, or Vietnam - it’s become a reality.”Ī candid from behind the scenes of The Long Road Home on Fort Hood. “Being able to travel back to your battlespace without fear of being captured and ending up in a YouTube video is a gift that can’t be put into words,” he says. “We veterans and Gold Star Families got to walk back to the streets of Sadr City that we would never get to go. “The smell was the only thing that wasn’t exactly recreated,” says Fowler. More important than that, however, is the exact recreation of Sadr City built on Fort Hood that took the veterans on the base back to April 2004. depicted on screen, you can be sure that’s what Fort Hood really looks like. The Fort Hood scenes are really Fort Hood. Bonds were formed between the actors and the real life families, and everyone became infused with the same mission that Martha really started that these families and these experiences would not be lost to history.”Ħ. “And it was very important to me the cast reached out to their real-life counterparts. “So many of the families sent us their photographs, actual photographs used as props, or photographs of their homes for us to recreate,” Alanne says. Sadr City was meticulously recreated on Fort Hood for these scenes. But the realism didn’t stop with cooperation.Ī still from The Long Road Home. After the show’s Los Angeles premiere, the veterans and Gold Star Families took the stage with their TV counterparts, to a standing ovation from an elite Hollywood audience. The show originally premiered in Fort Hood’s Abrams Gym.
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