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
Well-told and admonitory.
Young-rags-to-mature-riches memoir by broker and motivational speaker Gardner.
Born and raised in the Milwaukee ghetto, the author pulled himself up from considerable disadvantage. He was fatherless, and his adored mother wasn’t always around; once, as a child, he spied her at a family funeral accompanied by a prison guard. When beautiful, evanescent Moms was there, Chris also had to deal with Freddie “I ain’t your goddamn daddy!” Triplett, one of the meanest stepfathers in recent literature. Chris did “the dozens” with the homies, boosted a bit and in the course of youthful adventure was raped. His heroes were Miles Davis, James Brown and Muhammad Ali. Meanwhile, at the behest of Moms, he developed a fondness for reading. He joined the Navy and became a medic (preparing badass Marines for proctology), and a proficient lab technician. Moving up in San Francisco, married and then divorced, he sold medical supplies. He was recruited as a trainee at Dean Witter just around the time he became a homeless single father. All his belongings in a shopping cart, Gardner sometimes slept with his young son at the office (apparently undiscovered by the night cleaning crew). The two also frequently bedded down in a public restroom. After Gardner’s talents were finally appreciated by the firm of Bear Stearns, his American Dream became real. He got the cool duds, hot car and fine ladies so coveted from afar back in the day. He even had a meeting with Nelson Mandela. Through it all, he remained a prideful parent. His own no-daddy blues are gone now.
Well-told and admonitory.Pub Date: June 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-06-074486-3
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Amistad/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2006
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
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