the end of the world as we know it goolrick

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).

Goolrick is clearly a victim of his parents’ brutal abuse, but he has broken out of the categories of “victim” and “survivor” to become a powerful truth-teller. The language is lush and poetic while never becoming purple. One of the most gripping and emotionally insightful passages is of his father’s funeral, where Goolrick makes clear how hard it is to bury a man you haven’t forgiven. The author interweaves scenes from his childhood with scenes from his adult life: his mother’s attempt to get dry, his own breakdown and drinking problem, his mother’s death. The chiffon dresses always wound up with cigarette burns, and the hectic entertaining was artifice and pretense, a frantic effort to cover up alcoholism and other, more hideous, family secrets. But something was off-kilter, at even the grandest parties. Here, too, are cocktail parties that would have inspired Douglas Sirk: Goolrick describes the lavish fetes his parents threw, the lovely chiffon dresses his mother wore. The deformed weirdos, a staple of Southern grotesque, are here, including severely retarded aunt Dodo, who one day asked young Robert to kiss her passionately. He recounts a Virginia childhood worthy of William Styron and Flannery O’Connor. A devastating debut memoir about a Southern childhood.Ī simple summary of the storyline of this memoir might inspire an eye-roll: Do we really need another tale about someone growing up in a South of days-gone-by, surrounded by eccentric relatives and neighbors, with a little alcoholism and incest thrown in for good measure? But Goolrick takes that tired scenario and makes it magical.

The end of the world as we know it goolrick