A penetrating portrait of a complex political thinker.
How Machiavelli’s writings can guide political action in times of stress.
In a slim, beautifully illustrated volume, French historian Boucheron (History/Collège de France; France in the World: A New Global History, 2019, etc.) distills the life and works of Renaissance writer Niccolò Machiavelli (1469-1527), with the goal of restoring “the face of Machiavelli that lies hidden behind the mask of Machiavellianism.” The author of The Prince, Boucheron believes, was more than a “wily and unscrupulous strategist” who crafted a cynical guide for tyrants and “put violence at the heart of political decisions.” Serving for 15 years as secretary of the chancery in Florence, he witnessed political intrigues at home and abroad and, in 1512, became implicated in a coup that resulted in his imprisonment, torture, and exile. Within a year, deeply disillusioned with statesmen who failed to act with speed and decisiveness, he wrote The Prince, which, surprisingly, he dedicated to Lorenzo de’ Medici, a member of the family that had destroyed Florence’s republican government—and Machiavelli’s career. Both the context and content make The Prince an enigmatic, controversial text: Did Machiavelli write for princes “or for those wanting to resist them?” Was he offering “instruction to the powerful” in the art of tyranny or “instructing the people on what they have to fear”? Boucheron believes that he addressed his book to princes who have attained power through conquest, force, guile, or luck and therefore must find the means “both to preserve the state” and their own position. Characterizing most humans as “ungrateful, fickle, liars, and deceivers,” Machiavelli advised a prince to always expect “the worst from those he governs.” Boucheron concurs with that assessment: “You make laws, or avoid making them, anticipating their most nefarious use,” he asserts. Because Machiavelli is a “thinker of alternatives who dissects every situation into an ‘either or else’ and is acutely sensitive to the mutability of political situations, Boucheron argues provocatively for his relevance to our own times. “He heralds tempests,” writes the author, “not to avert them, but to teach us to think in heavy weather.”
A penetrating portrait of a complex political thinker.Pub Date: Feb. 11, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-59051-952-3
Page Count: 160
Publisher: Other Press
Review Posted Online: Sept. 28, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2019
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 horde-pleaser, well-written and full of surprises.
“The Mongols swept across the globe as conquerors,” writes the appreciative pop anthropologist-historian Weatherford (The History of Money, 1997, etc.), “but also as civilization’s unrivaled cultural carriers.”
No business-secrets fluffery here, though Weatherford does credit Genghis Khan and company for seeking “not merely to conquer the world but to impose a global order based on free trade, a single international law, and a universal alphabet with which to write all the languages of the world.” Not that the world was necessarily appreciative: the Mongols were renowned for, well, intemperance in war and peace, even if Weatherford does go rather lightly on the atrocities-and-butchery front. Instead, he accentuates the positive changes the Mongols, led by a visionary Genghis Khan, brought to the vast territories they conquered, if ever so briefly: the use of carpets, noodles, tea, playing cards, lemons, carrots, fabrics, and even a few words, including the cheer hurray. (Oh, yes, and flame throwers, too.) Why, then, has history remembered Genghis and his comrades so ungenerously? Whereas Geoffrey Chaucer considered him “so excellent a lord in all things,” Genghis is a byword for all that is savage and terrible; the word “Mongol” figures, thanks to the pseudoscientific racism of the 19th century, as the root of “mongoloid,” a condition attributed to genetic throwbacks to seed sown by Mongol invaders during their decades of ravaging Europe. (Bad science, that, but Dr. Down’s son himself argued that imbeciles “derived from an earlier form of the Mongol stock and should be considered more ‘pre-human, rather than human.’ ”) Weatherford’s lively analysis restores the Mongols’ reputation, and it takes some wonderful learned detours—into, for instance, the history of the so-called Secret History of the Mongols, which the Nazis raced to translate in the hope that it would help them conquer Russia, as only the Mongols had succeeded in doing.
A horde-pleaser, well-written and full of surprises.Pub Date: March 2, 2004
ISBN: 0-609-61062-7
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2003
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