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 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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