A compelling portrait of the life of a man “subject to and involved in history, who believed…that by interpreting the past...
A brief, erudite exposition of the Florentine secretary’s mores and intentions.
In this accessible work, Celenza (Classics/Johns Hopkins Univ.) explores why Machiavelli’s The Prince continues to enthrall readers and how the author’s other, less-well-known works, such as his comedies, can help enrich the way we understand him. Employing both biography and history, Celenza delves deep into Machiavelli’s world. Born in 1469 into a cultured family in which the Latin classics were significant parts of his education, Machiavelli lived in a time when the Italian language was just emerging richly from the more stultified Latin, thanks largely to the work of Dante. In 15th-century Florence, the concentration of wealth and influence, exemplified by the Medici family, reached its terrible climax in the murder of Giuliano Medici in 1478 by the rival Pazzi family, with his brother Lorenzo the Magnificent barely escaping with his life. These “premodern conditions” meant that life was fraught with conflict and violence close to home, themes that Machiavelli used to full effect in The Prince. A man of action himself, Machiavelli had held important ambassadorial offices during the Florentine republic’s tumultuous time at the start of the 16th century. He witnessed Cesare Borgia’s military rise and fall, a series of events that impressed on him the importance of a vigorous military behind a decisive leader. When the Medicis returned to power, Machiavelli was imprisoned, tortured and then confined to his farm, where he began writing The Prince as a way of ingratiating himself with his potential new employers. Celenza explores its language (“lapidary, often funny and homespun, but utterly elegant”), its form as a dialogue, its allusions to Latin classics and, above all, Machiavelli's insistence on looking at the world as it is rather than how it ought to be.
A compelling portrait of the life of a man “subject to and involved in history, who believed…that by interpreting the past sagely, one could act more fruitfully in the present.”Pub Date: Feb. 1, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-674-41612-3
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Harvard Univ.
Review Posted Online: Nov. 19, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2014
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”
The powerful story of a father’s past and a son’s future.
Atlantic senior writer Coates (The Beautiful Struggle: A Father, Two Sons, and an Unlikely Road to Manhood, 2008) offers this eloquent memoir as a letter to his teenage son, bearing witness to his own experiences and conveying passionate hopes for his son’s life. “I am wounded,” he writes. “I am marked by old codes, which shielded me in one world and then chained me in the next.” Coates grew up in the tough neighborhood of West Baltimore, beaten into obedience by his father. “I was a capable boy, intelligent and well-liked,” he remembers, “but powerfully afraid.” His life changed dramatically at Howard University, where his father taught and from which several siblings graduated. Howard, he writes, “had always been one of the most critical gathering posts for black people.” He calls it The Mecca, and its faculty and his fellow students expanded his horizons, helping him to understand “that the black world was its own thing, more than a photo-negative of the people who believe they are white.” Coates refers repeatedly to whites’ insistence on their exclusive racial identity; he realizes now “that nothing so essentialist as race” divides people, but rather “the actual injury done by people intent on naming us, intent on believing that what they have named matters more than anything we could ever actually do.” After he married, the author’s world widened again in New York, and later in Paris, where he finally felt extricated from white America’s exploitative, consumerist dreams. He came to understand that “race” does not fully explain “the breach between the world and me,” yet race exerts a crucial force, and young blacks like his son are vulnerable and endangered by “majoritarian bandits.” Coates desperately wants his son to be able to live “apart from fear—even apart from me.”
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”Pub Date: July 8, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-8129-9354-7
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Spiegel & Grau
Review Posted Online: May 5, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2015
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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
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