Synopses & Reviews
The Prince, Niccolò Machiavelli's handbook on power how to get it and how to keep it has been enormously influential in the centuries since it was written, garnering a heady mixture of admiration, fear, and contempt. Its author, born to an established middle-class family, was no prince himself. Machiavelli (14691527) worked as a courtier and diplomat for the Republic of Florence and enjoyed some small fame in his time as the author of bawdy plays and poems. Upon the Medici's return to power, however, he found himself summarily dismissed from the government he had served for decades and exiled from the city where he was born.
In this discerning new biography, Ross King rescues Machiavelli's legacy from caricature, detailing the vibrant political and social context that influenced his thought and underscoring the humanity of one of history's finest political thinkers. Ross King's Machiavelli visits fortune-tellers, produces wine on his Tuscan estate, travels Europe tirelessly on horseback as a diplomatic envoy, and is a passionate scholar of antiquity but above all, a keen observer of human nature.
Review
"[A] highly readable portrait." Booklist
About the Author
Ross King is the author of the New York Times bestselling Michelangelo and the Pope's Ceiling and Brunelleschi's Dome selected by BookSense as the Best Nonfiction Book of 2001 in addition to several novels. Born and raised in Canada, King moved to England after earning his Ph.D. in English literature and now lives outside Oxford.