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...
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
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by Hanya Yanagihara ‧ RELEASE DATE: March 10, 2015
The phrase “tour de force” could have been invented for this audacious novel.
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Four men who meet as college roommates move to New York and spend the next three decades gaining renown in their professions—as an architect, painter, actor and lawyer—and struggling with demons in their intertwined personal lives.
Yanagihara (The People in the Trees, 2013) takes the still-bold leap of writing about characters who don’t share her background; in addition to being male, JB is African-American, Malcolm has a black father and white mother, Willem is white, and “Jude’s race was undetermined”—deserted at birth, he was raised in a monastery and had an unspeakably traumatic childhood that’s revealed slowly over the course of the book. Two of them are gay, one straight and one bisexual. There isn’t a single significant female character, and for a long novel, there isn’t much plot. There aren’t even many markers of what’s happening in the outside world; Jude moves to a loft in SoHo as a young man, but we don’t see the neighborhood change from gritty artists’ enclave to glitzy tourist destination. What we get instead is an intensely interior look at the friends’ psyches and relationships, and it’s utterly enthralling. The four men think about work and creativity and success and failure; they cook for each other, compete with each other and jostle for each other’s affection. JB bases his entire artistic career on painting portraits of his friends, while Malcolm takes care of them by designing their apartments and houses. When Jude, as an adult, is adopted by his favorite Harvard law professor, his friends join him for Thanksgiving in Cambridge every year. And when Willem becomes a movie star, they all bask in his glow. Eventually, the tone darkens and the story narrows to focus on Jude as the pain of his past cuts deep into his carefully constructed life.
The phrase “tour de force” could have been invented for this audacious novel.Pub Date: March 10, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-385-53925-8
Page Count: 720
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Dec. 21, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2015
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by J.D. Salinger ‧ RELEASE DATE: June 15, 1951
A strict report, worthy of sympathy.
A violent surfacing of adolescence (which has little in common with Tarkington's earlier, broadly comic, Seventeen) has a compulsive impact.
"Nobody big except me" is the dream world of Holden Caulfield and his first person story is down to the basic, drab English of the pre-collegiate. For Holden is now being bounced from fancy prep, and, after a vicious evening with hall- and roommates, heads for New York to try to keep his latest failure from his parents. He tries to have a wild evening (all he does is pay the check), is terrorized by the hotel elevator man and his on-call whore, has a date with a girl he likes—and hates, sees his 10 year old sister, Phoebe. He also visits a sympathetic English teacher after trying on a drunken session, and when he keeps his date with Phoebe, who turns up with her suitcase to join him on his flight, he heads home to a hospital siege. This is tender and true, and impossible, in its picture of the old hells of young boys, the lonesomeness and tentative attempts to be mature and secure, the awful block between youth and being grown-up, the fright and sickness that humans and their behavior cause the challenging, the dramatization of the big bang. It is a sorry little worm's view of the off-beat of adult pressure, of contemporary strictures and conformity, of sentiment….
A strict report, worthy of sympathy.Pub Date: June 15, 1951
ISBN: 0316769177
Page Count: -
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: Nov. 2, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 1951
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