New book in My Library - Discourses on Livy by Nicolo Machiavelli
The way “Discources on Livy” has got in my hands is fairly simple - I was very inspired by “The Prince” by Nicolo Machiavelli and decided to get his #2 (according to people reviews) book.
Last weekend I’ve finished its reading and now I would like to share sort of its summary and what this book meant to me personally.
The book is very well structured. It consists of 3 parts where each part contains 40 - 50 not very big chapters. At the same time, each chapter is a complete micro story with a certain summary. Such structure made reading to be a pleasure cause reading of single chapter took 5 - 15 minutes and it was very comfortable from the prospective of time planning.
I like simple, short and, at the same time, accurate descriptions that could be put to a single sentence. Making such description for “Discourages by Livy” I would say that it’s a great retrospective for all known to that time history (~1500 a.e.) on political, military and social aspects of life with keeping focus on Rome republic. It also quite tightly coupled with what Nicolo Machiavelli stated in his “The Prince”, but much deeper, as from my point of view. By the way, the book contains a lot of mentions and links to different parts of “The Prince”.
Talking about what I’ve found beneficial for myself, I have mostly the same feelings as after reading “The Prince”. While I’m interested in politics, management and psychology, “Discourses on Livy” gave me a lot of “case study” knowledge.
I had a chance to rethink different situations of my life through the prism of this book. It was really funny because very lot of times I caught myself projecting what I was reading to my own experience.
Making a summary, I would definitely recommend to read this book to people who are interested in politics, management, business and psychology. I’m sure that it will be very interesting and useful.
PS: I also would recommend to read “The Prince” first, before getting to “Discourses on Livy”. At least, for me such chaining these two book was just a perfect order for getting good understanding of described events.