The Concise 33 Strategies of War

A Book Review

Not my usual fare I grant you but I have been feeling in my water for some time now that the world is preparing for War and I want to be ready for it. At my age, having turned Forty 'F*****G Nine, I will probably end up in the Home Guard. I will be the man in the corner that looks like Private Godfrey but I will have the drop on the other members of the Battalion because I will have the knowledge gleaned from the above book. I know nothing more about Robert Greene but I now know about the tricks of the trade. I have thought for a long time that we are animals in suits and it wouldn't take long for us to revert to our feral, caveman instincts. Civilisation is a thin veneer that we wear. Just look around you in Asda & Walmart at Christmas Time. Every Time I leave the house I feel as if I am at war. I am in a constant state of alert. I am competing with others for space, time, food and attention. Chapter 1 encourages us to declare war on our enemies. The Polarity Strategy! Well I have been at war with myself since the year dot because my polarities are all over the place. Maybe now is the time to officially declare war on the world, perhaps with a Magna Carta style signing rather than in the Passive Aggressive mode that I have been using up until now. 

This is what the Independent had to say about the book http://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/books/reviews/the-33-strategies-of-war-by-robert-greene-468732.html  

I thoroughly enjoyed every chapter, as my occasional random postings on Facebook testify to! Am I perhaps really a bloodthirsty Machiavellian type? Chapter 3 was a challenge. It told me not to lose my presence of mind. Chapter 32 was teaching Grandmother to suck eggs. The title of this one "Dominate while seeming to submit" The Passive Aggression Strategy. 

My Father was a Pacifist and my heroes are the Reverend Martin Luther King Jr and Mahatma Ghandi so how can I explain my attraction to this book. Well, it is a short read which helps and even though I am not allowing the bloody images of war into my consciousness, they have always been there in my subconscious. As part of my Insanity in 2005 I imagined that I had been a soldier in the Red Army and had covered my hat in Soviet Badges. I consumed The World at War narrated by Lawrence Olivier, the first time around in the early seventies when war was recent history but now because it has become distant history, we know that it is time for war again. You could do worse yourselves, you peace loving types, than get this book out of the library and read it by torchlight under the covers, cursing your friends, enemies and the whole of humanity as you go!