In my opinion, this was a very well-written book. Paul Strathern did a really good job in conveying the story of these three men, and how their own stories intertwined briefly in 1502. However, I did feel like it could have been put together a bit better. I feel like that there could have been some parts that were cleaner and flowed a bit easier. As I said, however, this was a very well-written and well conveyed overall, and I do reccomend it as a read. ( )

I can't believe it. ! I thought this book was never going to arrive! I was to receive my advance copy in 2009, and just found out that my elderly neighbor had taken it to her home. Her daughter thinks she may have more of my mail as well! This explains a lot.

Anyway I read some of this book last night (five years too late!), and was not super impressed with what I read. The interconnection of the biographies to me did not seem to flow naturally. The format was interesting, although the content which could have been spectacular reading was just okay. I didn't really have time to go through everything, so I may revisit the book to read more closely some of the parts I kinda skimmed over. At that point I will readdress my review. ( )

I had a hard time getting through this one, though I was enthusiastic about both the subject matter and the genre of multiple intersecting biographies. It's obvious that a lot of work went into writing the book, so I feel bad giving it less than two stars, but I was not able to finish it with enthusiasm. ( )

Loved it - highly readable and hard to put down. Fascinating individuals in a fascinating period of history. ( )

This book took me nearly 2 years to read from start to finish. Of course I read about 150 other books in between starting and finishing it so I want to decipher why.

For me, it really was that this was a poorly written book. It wanted to be one thing and failed at it, then tried to be another, and was terrible in its effort. First I thought the author wanted us to be presented with a great piece of history, beyond what you would find in a textbook, or a dissertation.

As I read this though, we hear too much of the author's opinions, and his prose is too often evident to show that we have a scholarly work. We have something that jumps to conclusions of the authors own presumptions, and then turning back to a text based history, cites other historians who have written about our three characters we are studying.

That confusion, along with the introduction of a tremendous amount of supporting characters with little context and little mapping as we read along, left me so confused that I put down the book again and again. By our title, I would have expected to have seen closer how Da Vinci, Michiavelli, and Borgia influenced one another. What I am left with is that Borgia is the glue, and far too little is there for the author to tell us how they did interact.

He surmises from the lives of the artist and philosopher after Borgia's fall, that Borgia gave them a reason to change in their lives. But from my interpretation of this work, Borgia gave everyone a reason to change. Perhaps 350 years too soon, he tried to reunify Italy, and in hindsight was the best man for the job. Cesare comes off to me in all this more heroic then either of the other two, and yet he falls from power the quickest and much sooner is off to the grave then the other two men.

I shall never reread this work, and do not know that I got much from it. I think instead of, like a bell shaped curve, telling us the three biographies, concentrating on the years that their lives intersected, making that the only focus of the piece, with much more supporting material, would have been a better work. ( )