The 48 Laws of Power

Greene mined three thousand years of history, from the courts of Louis XIV to con artists and Renaissance schemers, to extract 48 blunt rules about how power is actually won and held. Each law comes with historical cases where it worked and where ignoring it proved fatal. Amoral by design and often uncomfortable, it became an underground classic passed hand to hand through prisons, boardrooms and hip-hop, precisely because it describes the game rather than pretending it is not played.