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). But in piecing together Morgenson’s conversations, memos and personal journals while serving (as backcountry rangers sum it up) “to protect the park from the people and the people from the park,” Blehm somewhat offhandedly illuminates the ultimate quandary of wilderness preservation: For whom and for what do we persist in it? Morgenson’s conflict yields an apt metaphor: Privately referring to outsiders who intruded into his idyllic solitude as “swinish Americans,” he nonetheless established an exemplary record of providing aid to all who got into trouble on his watch.Ī rambling, yet compelling portrait of a man who perhaps loved the wilderness too much.
The suspense is leavened by hints that the circumstances of his death are not to be immediately resolved. The question of whether Morgenson was in a state of depression serious enough to take his own life haunts the expedition as the search party fans out, some recalling that he “hadn’t been himself” in the weeks or even months prior. Yet while the book unfolds with flashbacks as his fellow rangers marshal to search for him some six days after his last communication, Blehm also builds the picture of a complex and conflicted person, as well as a man whose wife, having become aware of his recent affair, is seeking a divorce. Morgenson mysteriously disappeared in his 28th season as a backcountry ranger while on patrol in July 1996, in the Kings Canyon national park, some 200 miles south of Yosemite in a valley called, by legendary wilderness pioneer John Muir, one of the most beautiful in the Sequoia region. Probing account of the mysterious death in the High Sierras of a veteran National Park Service ranger and the passion that shaped his life.īlehm, an outdoor-sports editor and writer, goes to great lengths to establish the wilderness experience, skills and dedication of outdoorsman Randy Morgenson in a sometimes redundant apotheosis.
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