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
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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