The 48 Laws of Power

This is not a comfortable book. Robert Greene draws on centuries of history—from the courts of Renaissance Italy to the salons of Versailles to the battlefields of ancient China—to dissect how power actually works, not how we wish it worked. I came to this book as someone deeply interested in the Renaissance and the history of commerce and civilization. What struck me was how timeless these patterns are—the same strategies that worked in the Medici court work in modern boardrooms and political arenas. You can disagree with the ethics of it all, and Greene himself seems to be watching the game with a kind of detached fascination rather than moral endorsement. But you cannot deny the clarity it brings to human behavior. Read it with your eyes open.

To see many of these laws embodied in a single extraordinary life, Walter Isaacson's Steve Jobs is an illuminating companion—Jobs was a natural practitioner of power who seemed to instinctively understand what Greene later codified.