Mr. Bernini’s seamless weave of sources and storytelling sometimes resembles recent biographical works ... Smartly voiced, briskly paced, Oonagh Stransky’s translation from Mr. Bernini’s Italian boasts plenty of idiomatic color and avoids Renaissance costume-drama folderol ... The Throne paints a Machiavelli credibly embedded in his vibrant, vicious times—but capable as well of the flinty thoughts and words that would outlive them.
Bernini does a good job of describing the political and social chaos, the shifting sands of power from one city-state to another ... Well researched with wonderfully vivid details, Bernini presents Machiavelli in all the complications of a life spent navigating political waters, learning to say the right thing or nothing at all, and more importantly, learning how to write about it all.
This kind of flat mumbling happens throughout The Throne, even at moments that are meant to be the dramatic high points of the book ... Everything posterity knows about Machiavelli or thinks it knows is front-loaded onto the innocent year 1502, when no one knew those things and all the tension of Machiavelli not knowing those things is simply ignored.
