Targoff captures the Renaissance’s “simultaneous magic and strangeness” in a single woman.
“The Renaissance comes to life anew” in this insightful biography of a remarkable Italian woman.
“It is impossible to imagine the Renaissance without her.” Targoff’s (English, Italian Studies, Humanities/Brandeis Univ.; Posthumous Love: Eros and the Afterlife in Renaissance England, 2014, etc.) claim regarding the importance of Vittoria Colonna, Marchesa of Pescara (1490-1547), is a lofty one, but she makes a strong case for it in this thorough and painstakingly researched academic biography. Due to the paucity of extant primary sources about and by Vittoria, Targoff draws upon the complex history of the times and some considered speculation to tell her subject’s compelling story. The author has done yeoman’s work scouring Italian libraries, archives, and monasteries to locate, identify, and personally translate obscure Latin and Italian manuscripts. The Roman Colonna family was one of the most powerful in Italy, and Vittoria was well-educated and devout. She and her future husband, Ferrante, from Naples, were just children when their marriage was arranged around 1495; they took their vows in 1509. When her husband, a soldier fighting for Charles V, was killed in battle, she was “thirty-five years old, a widow, and childless.” Targoff describes her as a solitary woman. She wanted to enter a convent, but Pope Clement said no. Disappointed, she returned to the family castle on an island where she “transformed her sorrows into verse.” Her more than 130 sonnets about her grief and faith, Targoff argues, “broke entirely new ground for women’s poetry.” When a pirated edition of her poems was published in 1538, she became the first Italian woman to publish a book of poetry and the “most celebrated religious poet of the era.” She later became friends with the influential religious reformer Reginald Pole and Michelangelo, “my most singular friend.”
Targoff captures the Renaissance’s “simultaneous magic and strangeness” in a single woman.Pub Date: April 17, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-374-14094-6
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: Nov. 20, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2018
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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