LUCREZIA BORGIA

Name: LUCREZIA BORGIA
Author: John Faunce
ISBN: 0-609-60974-2

by John Faunce ‧ RELEASE DATE: March 1, 2003

Witty, fun, and informative: a marvelous portrait of a monstrous family riding the whirlwind in one of history’s most...

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An entertaining debut about daily life—and death—in the papal court of Renaissance Italy.

In the Middle Ages and Renaissance, when all great men (sworn to celibacy or not) were expected to have at least several mistresses, there was no shortage of the children of popes. Lucrezia Borgia, for example, was the daughter of Pope Alexander VI, and, like just about everyone who grew up at the foot of a throne, her chief hobby and delight was power politics. As a woman, of course, she could never command an army (like her brother Juan, the Duke of Grandia) or sit in the College of Cardinals (like her brother Cesare—who would have preferred to command an army). But Italian women have always had a way of commanding behind the scenes, and Lucrezia grew into a mistress of that art. Although she was considered a great beauty and was married off twice (it helps to have a father in the Vatican when you need an annulment) for political alliances, her great skill was not seduction but assassination—her name in fact has become a byword for poison. In reality, she tells us here, she had to resort to poison only twice, judiciously averting a full-scale war between Rome and France in the process. Her greatest cross to bear, however, was her brother Cesare, who became increasingly megalomaniacal and even went to the point of raising an army (Holy Orders notwithstanding) to attack his father and sister. Pretty extreme for a family spat? Well, the Borgias were not exactly the Brady Bunch, though they did manage to hold the Papal States and most of Europe together for centuries.

Witty, fun, and informative: a marvelous portrait of a monstrous family riding the whirlwind in one of history’s most deliciously decadent epochs.

Pub Date: March 1, 2003

ISBN: 0-609-60974-2

Page Count: 304

Publisher: Crown

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2002

Categories:

HISTORICAL FICTION | GENERAL FICTION

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THE NIGHTINGALE

by Kristin Hannah ‧ RELEASE DATE: Feb. 3, 2015

Still, a respectful and absorbing page-turner.

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Hannah’s new novel is an homage to the extraordinary courage and endurance of Frenchwomen during World War II.

In 1995, an elderly unnamed widow is moving into an Oregon nursing home on the urging of her controlling son, Julien, a surgeon. This trajectory is interrupted when she receives an invitation to return to France to attend a ceremony honoring passeurs: people who aided the escape of others during the war. Cut to spring, 1940: Viann has said goodbye to husband Antoine, who's off to hold the Maginot line against invading Germans. She returns to tending her small farm, Le Jardin, in the Loire Valley, teaching at the local school and coping with daughter Sophie’s adolescent rebellion. Soon, that world is upended: The Germans march into Paris and refugees flee south, overrunning Viann’s land. Her long-estranged younger sister, Isabelle, who has been kicked out of multiple convent schools, is sent to Le Jardin by Julien, their father in Paris, a drunken, decidedly unpaternal Great War veteran. As the depredations increase in the occupied zone—food rationing, systematic looting, and the billeting of a German officer, Capt. Beck, at Le Jardin—Isabelle’s outspokenness is a liability. She joins the Resistance, volunteering for dangerous duty: shepherding downed Allied airmen across the Pyrenees to Spain. Code-named the Nightingale, Isabelle will rescue many before she's captured. Meanwhile, Viann’s journey from passive to active resistance is less dramatic but no less wrenching. Hannah vividly demonstrates how the Nazis, through starvation, intimidation and barbarity both casual and calculated, demoralized the French, engineering a community collapse that enabled the deportations and deaths of more than 70,000 Jews. Hannah’s proven storytelling skills are ideally suited to depicting such cataclysmic events, but her tendency to sentimentalize undermines the gravitas of this tale.

Still, a respectful and absorbing page-turner.

Pub Date: Feb. 3, 2015

ISBN: 978-0-312-57722-3

Page Count: 448

Publisher: St. Martin's

Review Posted Online: Nov. 19, 2014

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2014

Categories:

HISTORICAL FICTION | FAMILY LIFE & FRIENDSHIP

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TO KILL A MOCKINGBIRD

by Harper Lee ‧ RELEASE DATE: July 11, 1960

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A first novel, this is also a first person account of Scout's (Jean Louise) recall of the years that led to the ending of a mystery, the breaking of her brother Jem's elbow, the death of her father's enemy — and the close of childhood years. A widower, Atticus raises his children with legal dispassion and paternal intelligence, and is ably abetted by Calpurnia, the colored cook, while the Alabama town of Maycomb, in the 1930's, remains aloof to their divergence from its tribal patterns. Scout and Jem, with their summer-time companion, Dill, find their paths free from interference — but not from dangers; their curiosity about the imprisoned Boo, whose miserable past is incorporated in their play, results in a tentative friendliness; their fears of Atticus' lack of distinction is dissipated when he shoots a mad dog; his defense of a Negro accused of raping a white girl, Mayella Ewell, is followed with avid interest and turns the rabble whites against him. Scout is the means of averting an attack on Atticus but when he loses the case it is Boo who saves Jem and Scout by killing Mayella's father when he attempts to murder them. The shadows of a beginning for black-white understanding, the persistent fight that Scout carries on against school, Jem's emergence into adulthood, Calpurnia's quiet power, and all the incidents touching on the children's "growing outward" have an attractive starchiness that keeps this southern picture pert and provocative. There is much advance interest in this book; it has been selected by the Literary Guild and Reader's Digest; it should win many friends.