A compelling portrait of the life of a man “subject to and involved in history, who believed…that by interpreting the past...
A brief, erudite exposition of the Florentine secretary’s mores and intentions.
In this accessible work, Celenza (Classics/Johns Hopkins Univ.) explores why Machiavelli’s The Prince continues to enthrall readers and how the author’s other, less-well-known works, such as his comedies, can help enrich the way we understand him. Employing both biography and history, Celenza delves deep into Machiavelli’s world. Born in 1469 into a cultured family in which the Latin classics were significant parts of his education, Machiavelli lived in a time when the Italian language was just emerging richly from the more stultified Latin, thanks largely to the work of Dante. In 15th-century Florence, the concentration of wealth and influence, exemplified by the Medici family, reached its terrible climax in the murder of Giuliano Medici in 1478 by the rival Pazzi family, with his brother Lorenzo the Magnificent barely escaping with his life. These “premodern conditions” meant that life was fraught with conflict and violence close to home, themes that Machiavelli used to full effect in The Prince. A man of action himself, Machiavelli had held important ambassadorial offices during the Florentine republic’s tumultuous time at the start of the 16th century. He witnessed Cesare Borgia’s military rise and fall, a series of events that impressed on him the importance of a vigorous military behind a decisive leader. When the Medicis returned to power, Machiavelli was imprisoned, tortured and then confined to his farm, where he began writing The Prince as a way of ingratiating himself with his potential new employers. Celenza explores its language (“lapidary, often funny and homespun, but utterly elegant”), its form as a dialogue, its allusions to Latin classics and, above all, Machiavelli's insistence on looking at the world as it is rather than how it ought to be.
A compelling portrait of the life of a man “subject to and involved in history, who believed…that by interpreting the past sagely, one could act more fruitfully in the present.”Pub Date: Feb. 1, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-674-41612-3
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Harvard Univ.
Review Posted Online: Nov. 19, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2014
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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