Knowledgable but not particularly compelling.
Ill-focused, overstuffed portrait of the powerful Pope Alexander VI and his ambitious children, by prolific British historian Hibbert (Napoleon, His Wives and Women, 2002, etc.).
Born Rodrigo Borgia in 1431, the ruthless, dissolute but rigorously competent family patriarch received the papal tiara in 1492, probably because of the ample bribes he bestowed. As Alexander VI, he worked to consolidate his position amid Rome’s violence and squalor. He used his children by courtesan Vannozza de’ Catanei to great political advantage, and Hibbert’s spotlight flickers intermittently on them. Beautiful, accomplished daughter Lucrezia was married off several times, first into the illustrious Sforza family and later to the Duke of Este. Eldest son Cesare, made a cardinal at age 18, showed his prowess best in seducing women and in the field of battle. Alexander VI sided with Naples against the avaricious advances of France and Milan, and in gratitude Alfonso II of Naples in 1494 gave his daughter Sancia in marriage to the pope’s 12-year-old son Jofrè. However, when King Louis XII offered Cesare a French duchy and a French bride in 1498, the ever-opportunistic young man cast off his cardinal’s hat and headed up France’s invading forces. Cesare made glorious conquests in Romagna, hiring Leonardo da Vinci as his architect and general engineer and becoming the “splendid and magnificent” prince described by Niccolò Machiavelli in 1502. Nonetheless, the secretive, unscrupulous Borgias had many enemies, and Cesare’s position was drastically weakened by his father’s death in 1503. His lands were confiscated, and he was twice imprisoned before his death during a siege in 1507. Lucrezia managed to outlive her family’s infamy and died an estimable lady of Ferrara in 1519. Hibbert is so preoccupied with the admittedly juicy ins and outs of the Borgias’ political maneuvers that he neglects to offer much in the way of human interest.
Knowledgable but not particularly compelling.Pub Date: Oct. 1, 2008
ISBN: 978-0-15-101033-2
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Harcourt
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2008
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
PERSPECTIVES
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
SEEN & HEARD
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