Readers looking for the story of the Florentine historian’s life will be better served by Miles Unger’s 2011 biography....
The late Vivanti was a man who knew the works of Machiavelli inside and out. This book is not a biography of the man but an exploration of his writings.
Those who have read The Prince, The Art of War and The Discourses will have a leg up on everyone else reading this book, as Vivanti highlights the writings of this Florentine clerk and connects them to the local history. Some knowledge of local events in the 15th- and 16th-century Italian states is a must, especially regarding the Holy Roman Emperor, the king of France, numerous popes and local politicians, all of whom competed for control. There are those who insist that Machiavelli’s most famous work, The Prince, rather than encouraging harsh, dictatorial government, is really a satiric picture intended to lead readers to republicanism. As he compared the politics and population of Rome to those of Florence, the ability to sustain a republic in this Tuscan city seemed highly improbable. His History of Florence, commissioned by Pope Clement VII, is a good example of his attempt to please his patron while trying to include all the history. Even so, his statement that republics, with their diversity, are much more adaptable and likely to last longer than a princedom indicate his true politics. That he was a republican is without doubt, but the volatility of the area shows how difficult the establishment of such a republic would be. This was an era of Savonarola, the Borgias and Medici, strong leaders who tolerated little opposition.
Readers looking for the story of the Florentine historian’s life will be better served by Miles Unger’s 2011 biography. Students well versed in the classics, the historian’s vast writings and medieval history will most enjoy this academic biography.Pub Date: June 1, 2013
ISBN: 978-0-691-15101-4
Page Count: 312
Publisher: Princeton Univ.
Review Posted Online: Feb. 16, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2013
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
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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