Lucrezia Borgia: Life, Love And Death In Renaissance Italy

Rating:
Summary: renascent interest in renaissance intrigue
Review: a delectable journey through the tumult of Renaissance Italy with the Borgia family. A well written and accessible tome that compels one to read it with relish, hunger and desire.

Rating:
Summary: Sex, Murder and the Renaissance of the Arts
Review: In her 39 years Lucrezia Borgia lived quite a life, but then again when your father is the Pope.... ==We remember Lucrezia and her brother Cesare as incestuous and murderous villans of the time. Ms. Bradford's biography, probably destined to be the definitive work, present her in a somewhat different vein. Her view is more sympathetic, more of a pawn of a power hungry family than the untimate femme fatal.

Married off by the political whim of her father and brother when she was thirteen, divorced, then married for a second time before she turned twenty. Her second husband was murdered by Cesare. She learned how a woman could obtain power in a society ruled by men, and her next marriage was of her own choosing. She then proved to be an enlightened ruler, a skilled administrator and a friend to the arts.

This is a tale of sex, gossip, murder, astonishing beauty and ambition -- and this was the time of the Renaissance when the arts were flourishing, when the ancient writings of the Romans and Greeks were marking the end of the dark ages.

Fascinating Book.

Rating:
Summary: Really sucks the life out of a facinating woman
Review: Lucrezia Borgia live what was perhaps one of the most exciting lives in history. She survived the black death, one of the most power hungry families in history, the murder of her beloved husband by her equally beloved brother, several miscarriages three marriages and a power structure that hated her. In an age where women were little more than pieces of property, Borgia was an expert administrator, beloved by her people and relied on by her husbands.
Considering all of that, Sarah Bradford must be some kind of literary genius to have made her biography the most boring thing I've ever read.
Lucrezia's achievements and trials are barely glossed over while her wardrobe is accounted in minute detail. Her notorious romances are treated like a mere side-note to her hair care regime.
I hope someone writes a decent biography of this amazing woman someday!

Rating:
Summary: Lucrezia Borgia: Renaissance woman triumphant.
Review: Lucrezia Borgia: murderer? whore? or merely the helpless victim of her patriarchal family? The question is a fascinating one. Having previously published two accounts of the Borgia family, including a biography of Cesare Borgia, best-selling biographer Sarah Bradford (AMERICA'S QUEEN, DISRAELI, GEORGE VI, PRINCESS GRACE, and ELIZABETH) knows her subject. Perhaps the most notorious woman in history (her name has become synonymous with evil), Lucrezia Borgia (1480-1501) was the daughter of Pope Alexander VI (aka Rodrigo Borgia) and the sister of ruthless Cesare Borgia. In the five hundred years since her death, Lucrezia has been accused of first having incestuous relations with her father and brother, and then poisoning her father. In assisting Cesare with his career (p.101) and the scheming Borgias family in its political and dynastic goals (p. 64), Lucrezia first married at age thirteen at the behest of her father, and then married a second time to a man who was then murdered on the orders of her brother, before marrying a third time to the Duke of Ferrara (aka Alfonso d'Este), who opposed the notion of marrying her. Along the way, Lucrezia pursued numerous extramarital affairs and suffered several miscarriages and difficult pregnancies. Not surprisingly, Lucrezia lived a life of "supreme sorrow" (p. 270), "horror and tears," before turning to God in her later years.

While Lucrezia Borgia will always remain an archetype, Bradford succeeds in portraying her subject in a more human light, demonstrating that Lucrezia was transformed over the course of her lifetime from a powerless victim of the Borgia patriarchal order, to an enlightened Duchess of Ferrara and patron of the Renaissance arts. Scandalous reading, this biography.

G. Merritt

Rating:
Summary: Could not enjoy the book.
Review: This book was very hard to enjoy. I love history and I expected this to be a pleasant read about the life of Lucrezia Borgia. Instead, from the very beginning, S. Bradford buries a reader in the myriad of Italian (and non-Italian) names of people and cities, and never let that go. Half of the pages are about the Borgia family and only here and there S. Bradford remembered that this book was suppose to concentrate on Lucrezia. In addition, the story jumps from one event to another without any logical connection. Maybe I needed a PhD for this book, I don't know.

No doubt that S. Bradford did an extensive research and has a great deal of knowledge on Borgia family but I think that the book could have been organized and edited much better.

Rating:
Summary: Lost Forever
Review: Where is the bio of Lucrezia?
She is lost in the genealogy of all the important Italian families and their intermarriages and subsequent offspring that I lost heart in pursuing this work.

Rating:
Summary: Where is the story????
Review: Where Is The Story??? The book's outline, notes and sources seem to have been published by mistake. I read a lot of historical biographies and a lot of historical fiction. This, by far, is the least enjoyable one I have EVER read.

Sarah Bradford gets so caught up in dispelling the myth of Lucrezia Borgia that she forgets that her readers (me) do not have years experience of researching the Borgia Myth. Her text ( I do not call it a story) jumps in such a jumbled fashion from place to place, person to person, year to year and back again, leaving the reader confused and skimming to find the actual point. I sometimes had to read the same paragraph a couple of times to understand when a person had died/been murdered/been born or married. I think there should have been a more narrative style. I found there to be no actual voice or personality to the writing. If there was, it came across just as stiff and ancient as the endless renaissance letters, records, etc. from which Ms. Bradford draws.

I think I would have to read a few more books about the subject matter to understand what Ms. Bradford was trying to get across. Unfortunately, at this point, I really don't care. I think I deserved to have the myth at least referenced with the "actual" truth in the same book...especially since these myths are mentioned in the inside covers. I gathered from this that the point of the book was to enlighten the reader.

If you are looking for an interesting and informative read...look elsewhere. This book is drudgery.

Or maybe Lucrezia Borgia was just as boring as Sarah Bradford conveys her.