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Title: Niccolo's Smile: A Biography of Machiavelli by Maurizio Viroli, Antony Shugaar ISBN: 0-374-52800-4 Publisher: Farrar Straus & Giroux Pub. Date: 09 January, 2002 Format: Paperback Volumes: 1 List Price(USD): $13.00 |
Average Customer Rating: 3.83 (12 reviews)
Rating: 4
Summary: Michiavelli's Frown
Comment: A useful book, but it suffers the fate of too many translated works. The writing is flat, unemotional and strangely difficult to follow. Italian names trouble the English tongue and the narrative does not flow. Instead, the story jumps and jerks along as though someone edited it with a pair of tailor's scissors. For those of us not fortunate enough to have been born Italian (or to have sat in on Viroli's lectures), it would have been helpful to include a few maps and a glossary of the main characters and events.
This book has an undeniable charm and wit to it and is a valuable addition to our understanding of the life and times of Niccolo Machiavelli. It does not, however, take the place of a more comprehensive biography. I thought the smile business was overdone and would have preferred to hear more about his frown. In a word or two, I found this book slightly frustrating to read. But it did help me see more of the man and less of the demon. I loved the adage "It is better to act and repent than not to act and regret" that Machiavelli used to repeat to his friends. It made me smile.
Rating: 4
Summary: A Most Useful Biography
Comment: Viroli concisely depicts the people and tumultuous events of 16th century Italy. This illuminates Machiavelli's 15th and 16th century historical examples, and helps the reader of _The Prince_ and _The Discourses_ to obtain a firmer grasp of Machiavelli's subtle and ephemeral ideas.
Reading Viroli has helped me see that Machiavelli was a man out of season, and that this contrariness is key to understanding his works. Machiavelli saw, and experienced that the tectonic momentum of centuries of declining political and military virtue in Italy (and the rest of the world) could not be reversed by a single man in a single lifetime, whether he be an outcast Secretary of a failed government, like Machiavelli, or a deposed military strongman like Cesare Borgia.
Machiavelli's experience as Secretary fed his scholarship. It led him to understand the changes in peoples and states. Machiavelli reveals that truth very carefully and quietly in books that are seemingly straightforward and brash. The aspiration to rule, he might say, requires blindness to history, and a love of myth. The would be prince can not see that the highest examples of Princes, men who are revered for changing the course of whole nations, were failures and were despised by their contemporaries. Their "revolutions" unfolded over the course of generations as the mass of the people absorbed a new teaching, and a common language.
Rating: 4
Summary: Pleasing revisionism
Comment: This biography presents the full Machiavelli, not just the cynical philosopher of politics. The reader discovers many other facets of his sometimes lusty, sometimes ironic, sometimes mischevious personality. The book places Machiavelli in the context of local events current to his time. We can see how he was influenced by, and tried to influence, the politics of his day. Above all, this book conveys Machiavelli as a writer, more effective in offering advice than he was at managing events. Viroli's brief essays at the beginnings of some of his chapters are elegant works in themselves. A plan of Renaissance Florence would have been a useful addition.
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Title: The Prince by Niccolo Machiavelli ISBN: 0553212788 Publisher: Bantam Pub. Date: 01 August, 1984 List Price(USD): $4.50 |
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Title: The Book of the Courtier by Baldassare, Conte Castiglione, Baldassarre Castiglione, George Bull ISBN: 0140441921 Publisher: Penguin USA (Paper) Pub. Date: October, 1976 List Price(USD): $13.95 |
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Title: The Autobiography of Benvenuto Cellini (Penguin Classics) by Benvenuto Cellini, George Anthony Bull ISBN: 0140447180 Publisher: Penguin USA (Paper) Pub. Date: November, 1999 List Price(USD): $13.00 |
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Title: The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy by Jacob Burckhardt, Peter Gay, Hajo Holborn ISBN: 0375759263 Publisher: Modern Library Pub. Date: 09 April, 2002 List Price(USD): $15.95 |
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Title: Venice Against the Sea: A City Besieged by John Keahey ISBN: 0312265948 Publisher: Thomas Dunne Books Pub. Date: 20 March, 2002 List Price(USD): $25.95 |
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