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 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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