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Rating: 
Summary: Just for fun...not to be taken seriously
Review: Now, I don't like to write "negative" reviews per se. I believe you can learn something from any book (even if it is just that not all authors know what they're talking about). But I have to admit that this really is not a serious book. I believe this book should be filed under "speculation" because that really is what it seems to be based on. As the title indicates, this book would be an investigation of the idea that power creates a good sex life. The next step is to look at the lives of powerful people, and then to see how that power affected their sex lives. But, well, it fails in that attempt. This book is really only a few degrees above a tabloid magazine, being a calculated attempt to capitalize on the public's need for talk of sex, money, and power. Research and historical accuracy is not given a high priority. I am a virtual scholar on the life of Eva Peron ("Evita"), who is pictured on the upper right hand cover of this book (along with her husband, Juan Peron). And I know from my own research that a few things the authors of this book hold up as fact are actually myths that no serious biographer has considered viable since the 1970s (Such as the assertion that Evita organized a mass rally that freed Juan Peron from prison, thereby allowing him to become President and her to become his powerful co-ruler. Serious biographers know that Evita had nothing to do with that rally, it was organized by the unions and Evita was but an actress at the time with no connections to union leaders whatsoever). The arugment presented regarding Evita Peron in this book is so tired that I am amazed they even wrote about it here: the allegation that Evita slept her way to the top. Now, there is no true evidence that becoming First Lady of Argentina was ever an ambition of Evita Peron, and the authors fail to elaborate as to how such power affected Evita's sex life. In the delicately titled chapter "Eva Peron: Sleeping her Way to the Top" the authors fail at their own objective (the objective apparently being to prove that she wanted to be First Lady for the sake of the power it would give her). Though I am not a scholar in the lives of the other people mentioned in this book, with the treatment given Eva Peron I would guess there is just as much fuzzy historical reasoning regarding the other historical figures. Perhaps the most surprising thing about this book is that the authors chose to use one of the most haunting pictures available of Evita, but did not explain the circumstances surrounding the picture. In the picture of Evita Peron that appears on the book's cover, she is riding in a parade with her husband Juan Peron through the streets of Buenos Aires. The parade occured on June 4th, 1952, in celebration of Juan Peron's re-election as President of Argentina (this was the first election Argentine women had been allowed to vote in, and Evita had organized women voters into the first truly powerful female political party in the country's history). Evita was by this point so stricken by cancer of the uterus that she was unable to stand without support. Underneath her oversized fur coat is a frame made of plaster and wire that allowed her stand. She had taken a tripple dose of pain killers before the parade, and had to take a double dose when she returned home. Toward the end of the chapter, Dr. Ruth writes, "It's hard to consider Evita a victim." Which left me wondering, "Who ever suggested you should?"
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