Medici fans will expand their awareness of the family’s broad reach, and Renaissance students will discover Machiavelli’s...
An exploration of the life of a lesser-known Medici: Alessandro (1510-1537).
Fletcher (History and Heritage/Swansea Univ.; Diplomacy in Renaissance Rome: The Rise of the Resident Ambassador, 2015, etc.) displays an excellent comprehension of the Medici family and Renaissance political maneuvering. The connections between ruling and royal families, intermarriages, feuds, and assassinations can boggle the mind, but she carefully separates friends from enemies (often, one became the other). Alessandro’s appointment as Duke of Florence was thanks in great part to his uncle Pope Clement VII and Holy Roman Emperor Charles V. Alessandro and his cousin Ippolito were both illegitimate, but Alessandro was always referred to as “Moor,” and Ippolito was favored. Alessandro's mother was a dark-skinned maid, and while he was also dark-skinned, in 16th-century Italy, few knew of his ethnicity, and racism was not as pronounced as now. Pope Leo X, also an uncle, favored his nephews, educating them and slating Ippolito to take over power in Florence. For unknown reasons—although Ippolito’s expulsion from Rome for vandalism might play a part—Leo switched his support to Alessandro, creating an enemy of Ippolito. Alessandro was especially gifted in the stately arts and ensured the power of his family for longer than would have been possible without him. His peacemaking at the Treaty of Barcelona guaranteed the Medici’s power in Florence, and he also secured the marriage of Catherine de’ Medici to the French king. Alessandro may have been tyrannical and savage, but then again, maybe not. The author mostly leaves readers to sort it out, carefully noting his subject’s politics and accomplishments during his short six-year reign.
Medici fans will expand their awareness of the family’s broad reach, and Renaissance students will discover Machiavelli’s models for The Prince.Pub Date: Sept. 1, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-19-061272-6
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Oxford Univ.
Review Posted Online: May 31, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2016
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...
Elie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children.
He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions.
Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2006
ISBN: 0374500010
Page Count: 120
Publisher: Hill & Wang
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006
A wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor...
The excruciating story of a young man on a quest for knowledge and experience, a search that eventually cooked his goose, told with the flair of a seasoned investigative reporter by Outside magazine contributing editor Krakauer (Eiger Dreams, 1990).
Chris McCandless loved the road, the unadorned life, the Tolstoyan call to asceticism. After graduating college, he took off on another of his long destinationless journeys, this time cutting all contact with his family and changing his name to Alex Supertramp. He was a gent of strong opinions, and he shared them with those he met: "You must lose your inclination for monotonous security and adopt a helter-skelter style of life''; "be nomadic.'' Ultimately, in 1992, his terms got him into mortal trouble when he ran up against something—the Alaskan wild—that didn't give a hoot about Supertramp's worldview; his decomposed corpse was found 16 weeks after he entered the bush. Many people felt McCandless was just a hubris-laden jerk with a death wish (he had discarded his map before going into the wild and brought no food but a bag of rice). Krakauer thought not. Admitting an interest that bordered on obsession, he dug deep into McCandless's life. He found a willful, reckless, moody boyhood; an ugly little secret that sundered the relationship between father and son; a moral absolutism that agitated the young man's soul and drove him to extremes; but he was no more a nutcase than other pilgrims. Writing in supple, electric prose, Krakauer tries to make sense of McCandless (while scrupulously avoiding off-the-rack psychoanalysis): his risky behavior and the rites associated with it, his asceticism, his love of wide open spaces, the flights of his soul.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1996
ISBN: 0-679-42850-X
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Villard
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1995
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