The story of the obscure civil servant who became the world’s most famous cynic.
Art historian and New York Times contributor Unger (Magnifico: The Brilliant Life and Violent Times of Lorenzo de’ Medici, 2008) offers a captivating biography of Italian philosopher and playwright Niccolò Machiavelli (1469–1527), whose classic book, The Prince, remains a definitive handbook for practicing politicians. Born into an old, down-on-its-luck family, Machiavelli grew up in the small, independent Republic of Florence at a time of peace and prosperity. The fabulously rich Medici family ruled; great artists like Sandro Botticelli and Leonardo da Vinci flourished; and bright young Machiavelli, with little money or influence, came of age aimlessly, devoting his free time to reading, whores and gambling. Yet he was ambitious. At 29, he became Second Chancellor, serving as a diplomat and handling state correspondence for 14 years. Prickly and abrasive, he was dismissed in 1513 over policy decisions leading to the fall of the republic. With no means of supporting his wife and children, Machiavelli began writing his small book on the secrets of statecraft based on his own observations during government service. He hoped The Prince would lead to a new government job; instead, the book propelled him into political and literary history. Against the background of war and rivalries between Italian states, Unger traces the development of Machiavelli’s cynical, secular, anti-clerical views, and examines the blunt precepts of his masterpiece that announced “the coming of the modern world.” Shattering cherished assumptions about God-centered government, Machiavelli declared that rulers must rule by whatever means necessary. Now commonplace, his original, pragmatic insights simply stated what he called “the actual truth of things.” Ironically, writes Unger, despite his disdain of honesty, he was actually “the most honest” and least Machiavellian of men. Lively, well-researched portrait of a master political strategist.
Pub Date: June 14, 2011
ISBN: 978-1-4165-5628-2
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: April 18, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2011
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
An engrossing, intense, and highly descriptive narrative chronicling the ghastly conditions three pregnant women suffered...
The incredible true story of three Jewish women who survived the Holocaust.
Priska, Rachel, and Anka were married Jewish women in their early 20s when the Nazis took control of Europe. Like millions of other Jews, they were forced to give up their normal lives, all of their belongings, and their homes. Shuttled into ghettos and then off to one of the most notorious camps, Auschwitz II-Birkenau, they suffered through the Nazis’ increasing atrocities. But these three women all held a secret: they were pregnant. They were moved from Auschwitz and ended up in Mauthausen, another notorious death camp. With facing the most horrible conditions imaginable, all three gave birth right before the Allies accepted Germany’s surrender. In this meticulously detailed account, Holden (Haatchi & Little B: The Inspiring True Story of One Boy and His Dog, 2014, etc.) compiles an enormous amount of information from interviews, letters, historical records, and personal visits to the sites where this story unfolded. The graphic history places readers in the moment and provides a sense of the enduring power of love that Priska, Rachel, and Anka had for their unborn children and for the husbands they so desperately hoped to see after the war. Even though it occurred more than 70 years ago, the story’s truth is so chillingly portrayed that it seems as if it could have happened recently. These three women and their infants survived in the face of death, and, Holden writes, “their babies went on to have babies of their own and create a second and then a third generation, all of whom continue to live their lives in defiance of Hitler’s plan to erase them from history and from memory.”
An engrossing, intense, and highly descriptive narrative chronicling the ghastly conditions three pregnant women suffered through at the hands of the Nazis.Pub Date: May 5, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-06-237025-9
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: March 28, 2015
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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