The 306 Greatest Books #58 - The Prince

I am going back and posting all of my previous book reviews so that they are listed on my site in chronological order. The reviews are dated for the time when I read the book, hence the reason many of them will be listed for times before this website existed. 

The next up on my reading of the 306 greatest books is The Prince by Machiavelli. This book can be found on the Sybervision Book List.

All my life I have heard about Machiavelli and how Machiavelli portrays the "winning at any cost" type scenario. This mindset all comes back to this book, The Prince. However, that is not what I got after reading it. The book is very short, especially in comparison to the other Science and Civilization books on the list, but I also found that I got very little value out of it. The best thing I could see the book used for was as a companion book on how to rule properly. Overall, I felt the language used made the book difficult to read but at least the contemporary illusions were well explained so the book was not difficult to understand. This is definitely not in my top list of books to read, nor anywhere near it.