The Borgias and Their Enemies, 1431 – 1519

The Borgias and Their Enemies, 1431 – 1519 by Christopher Hibbert

Ignorance Confession: Before I read this book, I had absolutely no idea what or who the “Borgias” were.  I love history, but the majority of my knowledge is geared towards my home country (U.S.) and really doesn’t stretch more than 250 years ago when, not coincidentally, was when my home country was established. I am, however, always keen to learn more about history everywhere, so when this book showed up as a bargain on Amazon, I cautiously snapped it up.  300 pages later, this was a journey well-taken.  I enjoyed the book, and now know who the Borgias were!

Without going into too much detail of who this family was, let’s just say that they were a very powerful Italian family during the years mentioned in the title of this book.  The head of the family was Rodrigo Borgia, who may or may not be better known as Pope Alexander VI.  For those not too familiar with the Catholic Church, it wasn’t always led by holy, philanthropic, celibate men.  Oh no.  The position of “Pope” was sadly seen in a much different vein in the times before Luther and the Protestant Reformation. Quite often, those highest in the church were some of the most unscrupulous greedy men in history. Their view of the scriptures was often quite twisted, and the fact that they were a sort of ‘officer’ of the church meant that they could pretty much do and say whatever they wanted, while the humble subjects simply bowed in obedience and reverence.   Side note: Most of these humble subjects never learned how to read.  So they knew what the Bible was, but really didn’t know what it said.

So as our book starts, we get a bit of a background of Rome during the time and many of the key individuals. Rodrigo Borgia is one such individual.  Is Rodrigo an evil man?  Well, this book never explicitly states so.  We know he’s a politician and he has to make several unscrupulous deals ‘under the table’ as well as manipulate many of his enemies, but, hey, are politicians today much different?  So, yes, today it’s hard to imagine that someone that holds the position of Pope could be so sleazy, but we must remember to keep the narrative in context of the times.

Rodrigo has several children as well (yes, Popes had wives, children, and mistresses) and by the time he is Alexander VI, his children are somewhat grown. We read about their comings and goings as well.  Some, like daughter Lucrezia, have a host of husbands and lovers and are followed by the population insatiably as if they were reading the National Enquirer.  His son Cesare, however, seems to have a sadistic streak that puts fear into the entire nation.  This is a prime example of a rich spoiled kid who can do whatever he wants since his daddy is the big boss.  His treacherous behavior is indeed scary.  In fact, it seems like most of the book really centers on these two children as they have such ‘interesting’ lives.   There are a host of other children and family members, yet their sins and sensuality don’t compare to Lucrezia and Cesare, so they don’t warrant as much space in this narrative.

This leads me to my only gripe of this book.  There are simply too many people to keep track.  All of the different (mostly Italian sounding) names packed into this book will make your head spin.  It might be a good idea to take some notes while reading.  I know, you shouldn’t feel like you’re back in school when reading something for enjoyment, but it’s probably worth the trouble.   I wish this book would have included pictures (i.e. illustrations/paintings) of some of the key figures for ease of reference.  A family tree or two would have been majorly helpful as well.  Again, way too many mistresses, marriages, cousins, and allegiances between countries for the average brain to assimilate.  There is also tons of descriptions of weddings, festivities, and ceremonies as people enter and conquer cities.  I guess one must include such things if it was well known since ‘real’ history might be a tad scant from 500 years ago.

Still, a great beginner’s guide to a famous family.  With a length of 300 pages, there really isn’t too much detail to overwhelm you and get you completely lost.  I also now have a desire to learn more about this family, as well as the people and places that occupied this place and time in history.  And really, isn’t that what a good history book is supposed to do?

Note: I should point out that the Borgia family are lead characters of the popular video game Assassin’s Creed II.  This is one of my favorite games of all time.  Although I’ve played through the game several times, I never pay attention to “story” lines in video games.  I’m one of those grouchy old gamers who doesn’t give a rip about a story.  I play games to DO, not to LEARN.  But if, like me, you loved Assassin’s Creed II, this is probably a good primer to the real comings and goings of the family.

Blood Meridian

Blood Meridian – by Cormac McCarthy

There have been times in my life when I discovered a great new record album by a great new music group.  Everyone around me agreed.  Then, I would read a critic’s review of this great new record only to read how the critic slagged it off as being puerile and putrid.  I would then then listen to a piece of music that the CRITIC thought was great, and felt like I was listening to a defecating goat in incredible pain.  The same thing can be said about famous paintings.  A painting that I thought was beautiful would be dismissed by a critic as worthless and uninspired, yet the paintings that the critic loved, LOOKED like a goat in pain had defecated on the canvas.

I’ve never really understood this.  What is it that makes certain people’s tastes ‘superior’ than others?  When did it become ‘cool’ to hate everything that everyone loved and to love everything that everyone hated?  I bring this up because this is one of those books that critics everywhere love, yet I thought it was the most godawful exercise in tedium I have ever experienced.   I’d rather sit through a four-hour conference call on a Friday afternoon where everyone is forced to talk about their accomplishments for the week as opposed to having to ever read something like this again.

Before I go any further, if you’re reading this review and you really liked this book,  I mean, you REALLY liked the book (you don’t just say you did because you want to keep your seat at ‘The Cool Kid’s Table’) then that really is fine.  I’m not trying to belittle your opinion.  I just simply don’t get it.   I’ve easily read over 1,000 books in my lifetime (I started posting reviews on Amazon back in 2013 – I’m up to about 350) and I have to honestly state that this is probably the worst piece of fiction I’ve ever come across.  It’s definitely in my top (i.e. bottom) 5 anyway.

There’s no story here. There’s nothing here that interested me in the slightest.  There’s no care in the writing either.  For some reason, the author doesn’t even bother to put quotation marks around the dialog.  We get periods at the end of sentences and an occasional comma, but that’s it.  Again why??   Is this what an author has to do to pen a “classic”?    

The narrative (notice I didn’t say ‘story’) is about a 15-year old kid (known as ‘The Kid’) who lives in the Old West in the 1800s.  He leaves home one day, ends up joining an army to fight in Mexico, and ends up stumbling around the western frontier with mostly unsavory characters and encounters even more unsavory adversaries.  This whole book is nothing but dust, blood, scalpings, dying, disease, corpses, carnage and depression.  There were times where I really had to struggle figuring out exactly what was going on.  It’s not that the writing was necessarily confusing, it was just so uneventful and depressing. Again, this seems to be some sort of twisted appeal when we’re describing works of art.  I get that true art needs to be unique, but does it have to be so malodorous?   I’ll also add that I’m still confused by the ending of this book.  I even did a Google search and found some “ideas” but apparently my sentiment is shared by many.  Again, it seems as though ‘true’ works of art are supposed to be confusing.  Whatever.  Ugh.

This book was written in 1985; the same year I graduated high school.  I’m glad it wasn’t written before then, because it might have ended up as ‘required reading’ in one of my high school English classes.  You remember those classes, right?  The ones where none of the kids had a clue as to what they were reading, and hated the book so bad that they all bought the Cliffs Notes?    Yep. This is one of those books.

O.K. rant done.  Really.  Again, if you really did like this book, that’s cool.  I hated it.  All I could think of while reading was that critics were playing a cruel joke on me and trying to make me believe that I was an emperor wearing a suit of molded, smelly brand-new clothes.      Next, please.

Time Management Magic

Time Management Magic – by Lee Cockerell

This really wasn’t so much a book as it was an annoying infomercial. I lost track of how many times within this short ‘book’ where the author places links to external sites where you can buy more of his books, buy tools he recommends, or refers you to external sites that can ‘help’ you with your time management  skills (for a fee, of course).

Now, to be fair, Time Management is not an easy concept to master.  Few can learn it, but most cannot. As a professional trainer, I’ve taught seminars on time management for over 25 years, and I’ve sadly learned that it’s more of a behavior trait that one must have in their genes. This is where this book fails.  The author is simply peddling easy answers and throwing his advice against a wall in the hopes that some things will stick.  Imagine if you went for professional counseling for chronic depression and the therapist just yelled at you to “cheer up!” That’s what reading this book felt like.  Yes, we ALL know that to improve our time management skills we need to do things like have a “to do” list, but if it was THAT simple, why is it that most still can’t, nor won’t do it?

There are a few times when the author really does have solid, professional recommendations and advice, but rather than devoting page space to helping his readers accomplish what he’s suggesting, he simply throws his bullet points out, and then quickly moves on.  Not very helpful.  I felt like I bought a dieting book that “guaranteed I would lose weight if I followed the books instructions”, yet after I bought the book, I realized the book had only one sentence in the entire book that said “Eat a better diet and exercise”.  

At one point, he briefly says something like “Start your day early. I start mine at 6:15 a.m.” Again, this is GOOD advice, but I can tell you from 25 years of professional experience that 99.9999% of the workforce population will not start their day at 6:15 a.m. unless someone is holding a gun (along with a bucket of cold water) over their head.  What the author should do is take a point such as this, and craft an entire chapter around this concept with ideas, statistics, anecdotes, stories, and case studies.  Had he taken this route, he just might make a convert out of the 99.9999% of his readers who struggle with repeatedly hitting the snooze button on their alarm clock.

Another great example that he doesn’t expand on:  He states to “Surround yourself with great people”.  Now, this really IS great time management advise (assuming those great people have great time management skills), but the author doesn’t expand on the concept. He only devotes one paragraph to this thought (again, along with a link to a website where you have to pay for additional training materials), whereas he should have spent an entire chapter on this concept.  As short as this book is, I seriously doubt someone can remember a helpful point such as this once they’ve completed the book since the point was delivered in such a haphazard fashion.

Then we come to the author’s love of “The Daytimer”.  If you’re unfamiliar with a Daytimer, it’s probably because most people stopped using Daytimers right around the time they bought Windows 95.  The author arrogantly proclaims that the Daytimer is better than any of the modern, electronic means people use nowadays because electronics ‘causes one to be distracted’.  Now, I have nothing against a person who still uses a Daytimer (nor do I have a problem with a person who still watches movies on a Betamax), but it seems pretty pointless to offer this as a suggestion as we’re starting the second decade of the twenty-first century.  He even provides pictures of entries in his Daytimer.  Oy.

The author also tends to ramble on and brag quite a bit about what he did as an executive at Disney.  Again, more detailed (chapter long) examples would have helped.  When I finished this book (after only two sittings) I was tempted to want to ask the author:

“If you’re so gifted at Time Management, how come you haven’t figured out a way to not have people pay $100 a ticket to enter DisneyWorld and have to wait 120 minutes to ride The Haunted Mansion?”

Sorry, but “Just Do It” might be a good slogan if you’re selling lumpy athletic shoes, but not if you’re trying to radically change someone’s behavior and drastically alter how they run their day-to-day life.