This week, we feature a sobering assortment: potent novels on how power corrupts, moving poetry of World War I, and a history of the winter at Valley Forge.
Fiction When Power Corrupts
‘All the King’s Men’
By Robert Penn Warren
“All the King’s Men” is one of the most potent stories of how power can corrupt even the seemingly incorruptible. When honest and well-meaning Willie Stark is urged into becoming governor, his new power proves too much to rescind, leading to the inevitable.
Mariner Books Restored Edition, 2002, 656 pages The Triumph of the Weak
‘I, Claudius: From the Autobiography of Tiberius Claudius Born 10 B.C. Murdered and Deified A.D. 54’
By Robert Graves…