Medici fans will expand their awareness of the family’s broad reach, and Renaissance students will discover Machiavelli’s...
An exploration of the life of a lesser-known Medici: Alessandro (1510-1537).
Fletcher (History and Heritage/Swansea Univ.; Diplomacy in Renaissance Rome: The Rise of the Resident Ambassador, 2015, etc.) displays an excellent comprehension of the Medici family and Renaissance political maneuvering. The connections between ruling and royal families, intermarriages, feuds, and assassinations can boggle the mind, but she carefully separates friends from enemies (often, one became the other). Alessandro’s appointment as Duke of Florence was thanks in great part to his uncle Pope Clement VII and Holy Roman Emperor Charles V. Alessandro and his cousin Ippolito were both illegitimate, but Alessandro was always referred to as “Moor,” and Ippolito was favored. Alessandro's mother was a dark-skinned maid, and while he was also dark-skinned, in 16th-century Italy, few knew of his ethnicity, and racism was not as pronounced as now. Pope Leo X, also an uncle, favored his nephews, educating them and slating Ippolito to take over power in Florence. For unknown reasons—although Ippolito’s expulsion from Rome for vandalism might play a part—Leo switched his support to Alessandro, creating an enemy of Ippolito. Alessandro was especially gifted in the stately arts and ensured the power of his family for longer than would have been possible without him. His peacemaking at the Treaty of Barcelona guaranteed the Medici’s power in Florence, and he also secured the marriage of Catherine de’ Medici to the French king. Alessandro may have been tyrannical and savage, but then again, maybe not. The author mostly leaves readers to sort it out, carefully noting his subject’s politics and accomplishments during his short six-year reign.
Medici fans will expand their awareness of the family’s broad reach, and Renaissance students will discover Machiavelli’s models for The Prince.Pub Date: Sept. 1, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-19-061272-6
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Oxford Univ.
Review Posted Online: May 31, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2016
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
An autobiography as toxic and addictive as any drug its author has ever ingested.
The legendary booze-addled metal rocker turned reality-TV star comes clean in his tell-all autobiography.
Although brought up in the bleak British factory town of Aston, John “Ozzy” Osbourne’s tragicomic rags-to-riches tale is somehow quintessentially American. It’s an epic dream/nightmare that takes him from Winson Green prison in 1966 to a presidential dinner with George W. Bush in 2004. Tracing his adult life from petty thief and slaughterhouse worker to rock star, Osbourne’s first-person slang-and-expletive-driven style comes off like he’s casually relating his story while knocking back pints at the pub. “What you read here,” he writes, “is what dribbled out of the jelly I call my brain when I asked it for my life story.” During the late 1960s his transformation from inept shoplifter to notorious Black Sabbath frontman was unlikely enough. In fact, the band got its first paying gigs by waiting outside concert venues hoping the regularly scheduled act wouldn’t show. After a few years, Osbourne and his bandmates were touring America and becoming millionaires from their riff-heavy doom music. As expected, with success came personal excess and inevitable alienation from the other members of the group. But as a solo performer, Osbourne’s predilection for guns, drink, drugs, near-death experiences, cruelty to animals and relieving himself in public soon became the stuff of legend. His most infamous exploits—biting the head off a bat and accidentally urinating on the Alamo—are addressed, but they seem tame compared to other dark moments of his checkered past: nearly killing his wife Sharon during an alcohol-induced blackout, waking up after a bender in the middle of a busy highway, burning down his backyard, etc. Osbourne is confessional to a fault, jeopardizing his demonic-rocker reputation with glib remarks about his love for Paul McCartney and Robin Williams. The most distinguishing feature of the book is the staggering chapter-by-chapter accumulation of drunken mishaps, bodily dysfunctions and drug-induced mayhem over a 40-plus-year career—a résumé of anti-social atrocities comparable to any of rock ’n’ roll’s most reckless outlaws.
An autobiography as toxic and addictive as any drug its author has ever ingested.Pub Date: Jan. 25, 2010
ISBN: 978-0-446-56989-7
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Grand Central Publishing
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2009
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