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
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
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
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
© Copyright 2024 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
bookshelf
