by Miles J. Unger ‧ RELEASE DATE: May 1, 2008
A welcome addition to the body of Medici literature.
An affectionate portrayal of the Renaissance statesman with a penchant for art and poetry.
New York Times contributor Unger (The Watercolors of Winslow Homer, 2001) lays out Lorenzo de’ Medici’s achievements in this well-balanced tome. Lorenzo’s birth in 1449 created the potential for a dynasty. His grandfather Cosimo ruled over Florence, his father Piero was Cosimo’s eldest son and Lorenzo was the first male Medici born since the family seized power in 1434. Unger describes the young Lorenzo as overawed by his grandfather’s reputation and worshipful of his grandmother, Contessina de’ Bardi. After Cosimo’s death in 1464, Piero put great responsibility on 15-year-old Lorenzo’s shoulders; indeed, the boy was referred to as “the hope of the city” by many Medici partisans. Unger draws on letters sent to and from the Medici family to enrich his tale and also includes extracts from Lorenzo’s poetry, the exegeses of which are among the book’s most illuminating passages. Lorenzo shared his grandparents’ and parents’ affinity for all the arts. He used his associations with such Renaissance figures as Botticelli and Michelangelo to impress European leaders, and these artists in turn received the Medici family’s generous patronage. Lorenzo’s fondness for poetry, art and literature should not be underestimated, asserts the author, a stance that differs from recent scholars who have contended that his influence over Florentine artists may not have been so great as is often assumed. Many of these arguments, writes Unger, such as whether Lorenzo commissioned Botticelli’s Primavera, are mere quibbles when set against the creative atmosphere that the great statesman fostered. Further extracts from poetry written toward the end of Lorenzo’s life, which detail his fragile state of mind, bring the book to a neat conclusion.
A welcome addition to the body of Medici literature.Pub Date: May 1, 2008
ISBN: 978-0-7432-5434-2
Page Count: 496
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2008
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by Ta-Nehisi Coates ‧ RELEASE DATE: July 8, 2015
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”
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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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by Ta-Nehisi Coates ; illustrated by Jackie Aher
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by Elie Wiesel & translated by Marion Wiesel ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 16, 2006
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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by Elie Wiesel ; illustrated by Mark Podwal
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by Elie Wiesel ; translated by Marion Wiesel
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