Benner succeeds at what every biographer tries to do: she brings her subject to life for her readers.
A new look at an old book—and the philosopher/diplomat who wrote it.
Everyone in school learned Machiavelli’s (1469-1527) famous advice, set forth in The Prince, to those in power: the ends justify the means. Benner follows up on her previous Machiavelli’s Prince: A New Reading (2014), which argued for an entirely new way of interpreting the book, with this timely, dramatic, and comprehensive life of the Florentine, drawing on his poems, plays, letters, diplomatic dispatches, and his many friendships. This is a very personal biography. Benner invites us right into Machiavelli’s world, his thoughts, feelings, and beliefs, quoting him extensively on a wide variety of topics. The author begins with a helpful, four-page dramatis personae, and she tells Machiavelli’s story in lively, almost novelistic prose. A person says something “coldly,” while another speaks “quietly.” Some readers may be put off by this methodology—too much creative writing and less historical scholarship—but Benner knows her subject well, and she wants us to know him well, too. The well-educated Machiavelli worked in the government, then as a diplomat, and later as the leader of the Florentine militia. Life at this time in Florence was strewn with political and religious land mines. A wrong step on the toes of a certain prince, Medici family member, or cleric could get you thrown into prison, as Machiavelli was in 1513, for conspiracy against the Medici. He denied it and was tortured for nearly two weeks by having both shoulders dislocated. After he was freed, he wrote his famous treatise, published after his death. Benner posits a reading that has been put forth before but never in such detail: that Machiavelli’s “true intention in The Prince was to expose the perversities of princely rule.” In support of that argument, she provides an eye-opening, captivating portrait.
Benner succeeds at what every biographer tries to do: she brings her subject to life for her readers.Pub Date: May 9, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-393-60972-1
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Norton
Review Posted Online: Feb. 19, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2017
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
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