The Mona Lisa Stratagem
The Art of Women, Age, and Power
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- $9.99
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- $9.99
Publisher Description
Now, taking inspiration from a masterpiece of female beauty, mystery, and immortality, Leonardo Da Vinci's Mona Lisa, Harriet Rubin reveals a powerful stratagem for finding happiness and fulfillment in midlife and beyond.
Around the time a woman reaches 45, there is one enemy with the power to threaten her confidence, steal her beauty, make her feel invisible, and turn even the pleasures of life against her. That enemy is Time. Most women feel that an essential part of them dies when their youth is gone, yet the reality is women can grow more beautiful, experience new pleasures, and accomplish their best work later in life.
Interweaving stories of iconic women throughout history, Rubin codifies ten tactics--including how to be noticed, how to create circles of influence with you at the center, and how to express talents that have been ripening over decades. In the process, she uncovers the key to mature power, the highest art of leadership.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Though Rubin's latest self-help volume should resonate with working baby boomer women, she clouds her celebration of their maturity with gushing prose. Rubin (The Princessa: Machiavelli for Women) weaves through history, mythology and literature to illustrate that women can realize their true power with age. Her passionate explanation of "how to face the last big enemy: Time and Mortality" plays out as a frantic rush of not always contextualized historical references that range from former Washington Post editor Katharine Graham (she "enabled" rather than governed) and Cicely Saunders (founder of hospice care in England) to Italian queen Catherine de Medici, who asserted herself in widowhood. Ten vague tactics make up the author's "stratagem" for standing up to "Time" and building character. "Master the force of your mysterious smile, because a woman's laughter is more powerful than her tears," Rubin advises in the chapter title for tactic six, about disarming people with humor. Tactic seven, about drawing on one's anger and dealing with enemies, begins with the maxim, "Hate and wait, because one doesn't grow strong on a diet of wimpy burgers." In a culture that fetishizes youth, Rubin makes a welcome but cryptic effort to empower women 45 and older.