A penetrating portrait of a complex political thinker.
How Machiavelli’s writings can guide political action in times of stress.
In a slim, beautifully illustrated volume, French historian Boucheron (History/Collège de France; France in the World: A New Global History, 2019, etc.) distills the life and works of Renaissance writer Niccolò Machiavelli (1469-1527), with the goal of restoring “the face of Machiavelli that lies hidden behind the mask of Machiavellianism.” The author of The Prince, Boucheron believes, was more than a “wily and unscrupulous strategist” who crafted a cynical guide for tyrants and “put violence at the heart of political decisions.” Serving for 15 years as secretary of the chancery in Florence, he witnessed political intrigues at home and abroad and, in 1512, became implicated in a coup that resulted in his imprisonment, torture, and exile. Within a year, deeply disillusioned with statesmen who failed to act with speed and decisiveness, he wrote The Prince, which, surprisingly, he dedicated to Lorenzo de’ Medici, a member of the family that had destroyed Florence’s republican government—and Machiavelli’s career. Both the context and content make The Prince an enigmatic, controversial text: Did Machiavelli write for princes “or for those wanting to resist them?” Was he offering “instruction to the powerful” in the art of tyranny or “instructing the people on what they have to fear”? Boucheron believes that he addressed his book to princes who have attained power through conquest, force, guile, or luck and therefore must find the means “both to preserve the state” and their own position. Characterizing most humans as “ungrateful, fickle, liars, and deceivers,” Machiavelli advised a prince to always expect “the worst from those he governs.” Boucheron concurs with that assessment: “You make laws, or avoid making them, anticipating their most nefarious use,” he asserts. Because Machiavelli is a “thinker of alternatives who dissects every situation into an ‘either or else’ and is acutely sensitive to the mutability of political situations, Boucheron argues provocatively for his relevance to our own times. “He heralds tempests,” writes the author, “not to avert them, but to teach us to think in heavy weather.”
A penetrating portrait of a complex political thinker.Pub Date: Feb. 11, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-59051-952-3
Page Count: 160
Publisher: Other Press
Review Posted Online: Sept. 28, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2019
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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