“An Unlikely Prince: The Life and Times of Machiavelli”, by Niccolo Capponi

360 pages, Da Capo Press, ISBN-13: 978-0306817564

16th Century Italy (Florence in particular) are favorite destinations for pleasure readers of history and armchair time travelers alike, but who woulda thunk that Niccolo Machiavelli would be such an enjoyable traveling companion? Far from being the deceitful, shadowy character sprung from the nightmares of good civil libertarians everywhere, Machiavelli was in fact a gifted writer and philosopher who just happened to find himself in the middle of just about anything and everything and full of piss and vinegar, ego, humor, political fervor and dreams. While at his peak, his life among the great and powerful of Europe was a roller-coaster affair, and after his fall his struggle for place and purpose was nothing less than poignant. For An Unlikely Prince: The Life and Times of Machiavelli, author Niccolo Capponi researched and annotated this book as a scholar but wrote it like a novelist. The writing is bright, clever and insightful, while his personal translations of historic documents are fresh and often fun.

No historical novel will transport you quite like a good historical biography, such as this. If all you've read is Machiavelli's The Prince you've missed the best part of the story. Capponi does a great job of explaining the political and social environment during Machiavelli's career and connecting his writings to his career needs when he wrote them; in this light, some of the more controversial sections of The Prince make sense, for rather than being a handbook for tyrants that most scholars seem to think it is, it is in fact just a how-to manual for rulers of the day and age, a practical guide for rulers on how to live, thrive and survive in the world as Machiavelli found it, not a fantasy on the world as he wished it to be, i.e. Utopia by Thomas Moore. Machiavelli's political environment in his native Florence was a class-conflicted republic, embedded in a fractured Italy where contending foreign powers invaded at will; hence, it was better for a ruler to be feared rather than loved as Machiavelli contended, even if he would rather have been loved.

An Unlikely Prince is a much-needed addition to the canon on this most insightful, misunderstood and necessary philosopher, one whose thoughts and ideas may be distasteful but, for all that, needed and useful.