Benner succeeds at what every biographer tries to do: she brings her subject to life for her readers.
A new look at an old book—and the philosopher/diplomat who wrote it.
Everyone in school learned Machiavelli’s (1469-1527) famous advice, set forth in The Prince, to those in power: the ends justify the means. Benner follows up on her previous Machiavelli’s Prince: A New Reading (2014), which argued for an entirely new way of interpreting the book, with this timely, dramatic, and comprehensive life of the Florentine, drawing on his poems, plays, letters, diplomatic dispatches, and his many friendships. This is a very personal biography. Benner invites us right into Machiavelli’s world, his thoughts, feelings, and beliefs, quoting him extensively on a wide variety of topics. The author begins with a helpful, four-page dramatis personae, and she tells Machiavelli’s story in lively, almost novelistic prose. A person says something “coldly,” while another speaks “quietly.” Some readers may be put off by this methodology—too much creative writing and less historical scholarship—but Benner knows her subject well, and she wants us to know him well, too. The well-educated Machiavelli worked in the government, then as a diplomat, and later as the leader of the Florentine militia. Life at this time in Florence was strewn with political and religious land mines. A wrong step on the toes of a certain prince, Medici family member, or cleric could get you thrown into prison, as Machiavelli was in 1513, for conspiracy against the Medici. He denied it and was tortured for nearly two weeks by having both shoulders dislocated. After he was freed, he wrote his famous treatise, published after his death. Benner posits a reading that has been put forth before but never in such detail: that Machiavelli’s “true intention in The Prince was to expose the perversities of princely rule.” In support of that argument, she provides an eye-opening, captivating portrait.
Benner succeeds at what every biographer tries to do: she brings her subject to life for her readers.Pub Date: May 9, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-393-60972-1
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Norton
Review Posted Online: Feb. 19, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2017
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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