This enjoyable page-turner would make a fantastic biopic.
Portrait of an Italian princess who bucked tradition, embraced the arts and constantly defied her husband’s wishes.
Isabella de’ Medici (1542–1576) was the daughter of Cosimo de’ Medici, Duke of Florence. Murphy (Art History/Univ. of California, Riverside; The Pope’s Daughter: The Extraordinary Life of Felice della Rovere, 2005, etc.) vividly chronicles Isabella’s provocative, brief life (she was murdered at age 34), liberally drawing on quotes from letters sent by a variety of key figures. Cosimo treated his sons and daughters as equals, giving Isabella a freedom distinctly at odds with the period’s conventions. It was decided when she was nine that she should marry 12-year-old Paolo Giordano Orsini, whose family had long-standing ties to Florence’s illustrious past. By the time the two were old enough to wed, Paolo was a misogynist who frequented prostitutes and enjoyed hurting women. Murphy pulls a horrifying extract from a letter Isabella wrote in 1565 indicating that Paolo had beaten her—a major faux pas, since he was heavily in debt to Cosimo. Speculation in their circle ran riot about Isabella’s relationship with her father, which many believed to be sexual, although the author firmly points out that there is no evidence for this claim. Isabella remained childless until late in life, which was unusual in her era. This afforded her the freedom to throw flirtatious parties while her husband was away in the military, and she had an affair—detailed at length by Murphy—with Paolo’s cousin, Troilo Orsini. Paolo murdered Isabella and hired an assassin to kill Troilo in 1576, 12 years after Cosimo’s death. The author wraps up her account by describing how this caused further woes for the Medici family.
This enjoyable page-turner would make a fantastic biopic.Pub Date: April 1, 2008
ISBN: 978-0-19-531439-7
Page Count: 380
Publisher: Oxford Univ.
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2008
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 moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular...
A neurosurgeon with a passion for literature tragically finds his perfect subject after his diagnosis of terminal lung cancer.
Writing isn’t brain surgery, but it’s rare when someone adept at the latter is also so accomplished at the former. Searching for meaning and purpose in his life, Kalanithi pursued a doctorate in literature and had felt certain that he wouldn’t enter the field of medicine, in which his father and other members of his family excelled. “But I couldn’t let go of the question,” he writes, after realizing that his goals “didn’t quite fit in an English department.” “Where did biology, morality, literature and philosophy intersect?” So he decided to set aside his doctoral dissertation and belatedly prepare for medical school, which “would allow me a chance to find answers that are not in books, to find a different sort of sublime, to forge relationships with the suffering, and to keep following the question of what makes human life meaningful, even in the face of death and decay.” The author’s empathy undoubtedly made him an exceptional doctor, and the precision of his prose—as well as the moral purpose underscoring it—suggests that he could have written a good book on any subject he chose. Part of what makes this book so essential is the fact that it was written under a death sentence following the diagnosis that upended his life, just as he was preparing to end his residency and attract offers at the top of his profession. Kalanithi learned he might have 10 years to live or perhaps five. Should he return to neurosurgery (he could and did), or should he write (he also did)? Should he and his wife have a baby? They did, eight months before he died, which was less than two years after the original diagnosis. “The fact of death is unsettling,” he understates. “Yet there is no other way to live.”
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular clarity.Pub Date: Jan. 19, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-8129-8840-6
Page Count: 248
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: Sept. 29, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2015
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