Targoff captures the Renaissance’s “simultaneous magic and strangeness” in a single woman.
“The Renaissance comes to life anew” in this insightful biography of a remarkable Italian woman.
“It is impossible to imagine the Renaissance without her.” Targoff’s (English, Italian Studies, Humanities/Brandeis Univ.; Posthumous Love: Eros and the Afterlife in Renaissance England, 2014, etc.) claim regarding the importance of Vittoria Colonna, Marchesa of Pescara (1490-1547), is a lofty one, but she makes a strong case for it in this thorough and painstakingly researched academic biography. Due to the paucity of extant primary sources about and by Vittoria, Targoff draws upon the complex history of the times and some considered speculation to tell her subject’s compelling story. The author has done yeoman’s work scouring Italian libraries, archives, and monasteries to locate, identify, and personally translate obscure Latin and Italian manuscripts. The Roman Colonna family was one of the most powerful in Italy, and Vittoria was well-educated and devout. She and her future husband, Ferrante, from Naples, were just children when their marriage was arranged around 1495; they took their vows in 1509. When her husband, a soldier fighting for Charles V, was killed in battle, she was “thirty-five years old, a widow, and childless.” Targoff describes her as a solitary woman. She wanted to enter a convent, but Pope Clement said no. Disappointed, she returned to the family castle on an island where she “transformed her sorrows into verse.” Her more than 130 sonnets about her grief and faith, Targoff argues, “broke entirely new ground for women’s poetry.” When a pirated edition of her poems was published in 1538, she became the first Italian woman to publish a book of poetry and the “most celebrated religious poet of the era.” She later became friends with the influential religious reformer Reginald Pole and Michelangelo, “my most singular friend.”
Targoff captures the Renaissance’s “simultaneous magic and strangeness” in a single woman.Pub Date: April 17, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-374-14094-6
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: Nov. 20, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2018
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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