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
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular...
A neurosurgeon with a passion for literature tragically finds his perfect subject after his diagnosis of terminal lung cancer.
Writing isn’t brain surgery, but it’s rare when someone adept at the latter is also so accomplished at the former. Searching for meaning and purpose in his life, Kalanithi pursued a doctorate in literature and had felt certain that he wouldn’t enter the field of medicine, in which his father and other members of his family excelled. “But I couldn’t let go of the question,” he writes, after realizing that his goals “didn’t quite fit in an English department.” “Where did biology, morality, literature and philosophy intersect?” So he decided to set aside his doctoral dissertation and belatedly prepare for medical school, which “would allow me a chance to find answers that are not in books, to find a different sort of sublime, to forge relationships with the suffering, and to keep following the question of what makes human life meaningful, even in the face of death and decay.” The author’s empathy undoubtedly made him an exceptional doctor, and the precision of his prose—as well as the moral purpose underscoring it—suggests that he could have written a good book on any subject he chose. Part of what makes this book so essential is the fact that it was written under a death sentence following the diagnosis that upended his life, just as he was preparing to end his residency and attract offers at the top of his profession. Kalanithi learned he might have 10 years to live or perhaps five. Should he return to neurosurgery (he could and did), or should he write (he also did)? Should he and his wife have a baby? They did, eight months before he died, which was less than two years after the original diagnosis. “The fact of death is unsettling,” he understates. “Yet there is no other way to live.”
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular clarity.Pub Date: Jan. 19, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-8129-8840-6
Page Count: 248
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: Sept. 29, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2015
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