Intriguing, but best for those with a particular interest in Machiavelli or 16th-century Italian politics.
A chronicle of how Machiavelli’s unforgiving and complex view towards politics and leadership coexisted with an unusual generosity of spirit.
Born into a humble family during a time when Florence was ruled by the Medicis and among the richest of Italian principalities, Machiavelli read deeply and became enamored of the ancient Roman historians and philosophers. After the fall of the Medicis, the execution of Savonarola, and the establishment of a Republic, Machiavelli secured a diplomatic appointment. He was called upon to travel widely in service to the Florentine government, and he developed a strong reputation for his diplomatic and rhetorical skills. When the Medicis later returned to power and dismantled the Republic, Machiavelli lost his position. He wrote The Prince—a series of short treatises on statecraft—both as a display of his diplomatic virtuosity and in an attempt to ingratiate himself with the new rulers. Viroli (Political Science/Princeton Univ.) asserts that while Machiavelli is best known for advocating deception and manipulation in political matters, he had a robust appreciation for friendship and love in his personal life. In fact, the philosopher is most openly revealed to be both an ambitious and fallible man through his evolving relationships with women—including his wife, female heads of state, and a variety of lovers—rather than in his capacity as a politician. His love affairs are recounted in unedited, scatological detail, and the author also offers small selections from Machiavelli’s lesser-known works—thereby offering an unusual glimpse into the private life of a very public man. Throughout, Viroli struggles to establish a symbol of Machiavelli’s “smile” as a stand-in for his overall personality—and something he would like us to see as multifaceted, elastic, and enigmatic as that of Leonardo’s Mona Lisa—but it is a labored and unnecessary literary trope.
Intriguing, but best for those with a particular interest in Machiavelli or 16th-century Italian politics.Pub Date: Oct. 1, 2000
ISBN: 0-374-22187-1
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2000
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 horde-pleaser, well-written and full of surprises.
“The Mongols swept across the globe as conquerors,” writes the appreciative pop anthropologist-historian Weatherford (The History of Money, 1997, etc.), “but also as civilization’s unrivaled cultural carriers.”
No business-secrets fluffery here, though Weatherford does credit Genghis Khan and company for seeking “not merely to conquer the world but to impose a global order based on free trade, a single international law, and a universal alphabet with which to write all the languages of the world.” Not that the world was necessarily appreciative: the Mongols were renowned for, well, intemperance in war and peace, even if Weatherford does go rather lightly on the atrocities-and-butchery front. Instead, he accentuates the positive changes the Mongols, led by a visionary Genghis Khan, brought to the vast territories they conquered, if ever so briefly: the use of carpets, noodles, tea, playing cards, lemons, carrots, fabrics, and even a few words, including the cheer hurray. (Oh, yes, and flame throwers, too.) Why, then, has history remembered Genghis and his comrades so ungenerously? Whereas Geoffrey Chaucer considered him “so excellent a lord in all things,” Genghis is a byword for all that is savage and terrible; the word “Mongol” figures, thanks to the pseudoscientific racism of the 19th century, as the root of “mongoloid,” a condition attributed to genetic throwbacks to seed sown by Mongol invaders during their decades of ravaging Europe. (Bad science, that, but Dr. Down’s son himself argued that imbeciles “derived from an earlier form of the Mongol stock and should be considered more ‘pre-human, rather than human.’ ”) Weatherford’s lively analysis restores the Mongols’ reputation, and it takes some wonderful learned detours—into, for instance, the history of the so-called Secret History of the Mongols, which the Nazis raced to translate in the hope that it would help them conquer Russia, as only the Mongols had succeeded in doing.
A horde-pleaser, well-written and full of surprises.Pub Date: March 2, 2004
ISBN: 0-609-61062-7
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2003
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