Sun Tzu - The Art of War (3)

When a dog pees on a mountain, does the mountain care? Depends on the size of the dog, you might answer, but in general it won't. In general - what better segway that that to lead into my two cents on Sun Tzu's Art of War, commonly hailed as the essential read for business strategists, soldiers, garbage collectors, and, really, everybody, for war is a metaphor for life, and we all have one of these, after all. In spite of that Master Sun's strategic nuggets of wisdom were a bit lost on me. I don't object to anything said, and the style of the translation, and, I presume, the original, is very concise and poetic in it's condension, but what in this book I find applicable is obvious, and what isn't obvious doesn't seem applicable. On top of that this edition has been translated an edited by Thomas Cleary. Cleary follow every few sentences of Sun's text with serveral different commentaries, and the sequence of Sun's dense, poetic writing, and the commentators clumsy, wordy rephrasing makes this an odd comedic experience.