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Rating: 
Summary: Poorly written, badly structured - a disappointment
Review: Having just finished a biography of Servetus (Out of the Flames by Lawrence and Nancy Goldstone - which I highly recommend) - I was thirsty for more of the same, so I picked up 'The Pope and the Heretic' and bought it without a second thought (along with 'The Perfect Heresy: The Revolutionary Life and Death of the Medieval Cathars').I was very disappointed. The author takes a prurient interest in Medieval torture techniques which lends a sensationalist slant to the book. This in microcosm, is what it wrong with his treatment of the subject as a whole: it is a sensationalised account of an important scholar which pays scant attention to the man's ideas, and too much attention to his ultimate sad fate. I realise that the 'general reading public' probably has little taste for a dry, academic approach, but the author surely underestimates his readership badly here: anyone interested enough in the period to pick up and buy a book on an obscure 16th century heretic is likely to have a strong interest in the period, and may have a good working knowledge of the historical background. White's 'simplifications', at first simply annoying, become insulting, as they start to mount. He gets the details of Servetus' imprisonment in Calvin's Geneva wrong - understandable, maybe. He then describes Charles V's rag-tag soldiery who sack of Rome in 1527 as 'teutonic hordes': Charles was the most powerful (secular) man alive at the time, and as Holy Roman Emperor, commanded an army which was a mixture of many nations (including Spanish and French). At first I wondered if White was confusing Charles V with Atilla the Hun (it's difficult to tell, because he doesn't actually mention the name of the ruler who led the army which marched on Rome, or, for that matter why they did so). His gross characterisations of the complex and (to our modern minds) contradictory characters of the period (Elizabeth I, is a prime example) have all the heavy handedness of a poorly researched high-school essay: an analogy which occurred to me more than once as I read through this work. The book's structure is equally annoying. Perhaps the author is aiming to shake things up by intentionally chopping around in time (we learn the details of Bruno's life when he left his monastry at second hand, whole chapters after the author has him depart) - but the end result is that the book feels fragmented and sloppily put together. Repetitive detail in subsequent chapters creates the feeling that what we have here is a succession of essays, hastily cobbled together by an author who couldn't really decide how to order his work. But the biggest defect is in the writing, which is cliche ridden and soul-less. Important passages which deal with the turning points of Bruno's life are marred by pointless excursions into silly detail (at one point, for example, one of the characters 'pushes Bruno downstairs', while he is being arrested - and White speculates wildly on Bruno's state of mind when he is imprisoned by the Roman Inquistion - detail which he can have no way of actually knowing) in order to add colour, while there is little or no attempt to dig into the Bruno's ideas (which is surely the only reason anyone would be interested in the man - as White points out, the inquistion gave us plenty of martyrs (over a million)if all we want to contemplate is christian's inhumanity to fellow christian). The jacket promises us that Bruno inspired Spinoza. How? Spinoza is mentioned in passing, but the subject is never explored in great enough depth to convince the reader that Bruno's ideas helped fashion Spinoza's philosophy. Other key figures in the enlightenment are dragged in (Newton, Locke etc.), but there is little or no attempt to link them and their thinking with Bruno. Instead of proof, the author falls back on assertion - and the scant footnotes do little to back the assertions with evidence. I was left wondering if I could trust any of the history I found in this book, much less White's attempts at analysis and synthesis. I can't say if the book will fail its audience: but I know that it failed me: not just in a lack of scholastic rigour (which is bad enough) but by being deficient in that lightness of touch which is the hallmark of great historical writing.
Rating: 
Summary: Unfocused and Unduly Light
Review: I have a bad record of choosing books from the Airport Bookstores. I have made some really attrocious choices. This one is not that bad, but I could not recommend it to anyone. If I would have read the inside flap I would have realised that Michael White was the "Science Editor of British GQ Magazine" --- I did not know that anyone who read GQ would be even interested in Science, but if they are, there taste would be light to the point of idiocy, like this book.
The title is inane enough. It lured me in like a sucker... I was interested in reading the counterpoint of what would be two personalities --- the Pope and Bruno. But the Pope does not even really appear in the book.
The main problem is twofold:
1) Lack of any discernable organisation. The book is a mess. It is hard to put together any discernable record of the like of Bruno after I read this --- was he in Frankfurt first and then Paris? Maybe it was the other way around?
This means that White mixes everything up, chronology, main themes and the roles of people in the book. Ideas are not at all well developed. There is a sometimes peurile feeling about his writing style: when an idea is developed a little he switches to other things --- one feels that he is writing at times for the attention span of a 12- yr-old reader.
2) Weak development of themes inside the book. Scholastic ossification of the ideas of the Catholic Church is a great topic, but White's starts with a description of how Aristotle was always wrong on everything... and vaguely brushes him off as an almost personal hindrance to development of ideas. Such comic-book interpretations really show a lack of mastery of his subject.
White intimates a tremendous importance for the hermetic tradition, although he keeps this significantly nebulous (something that a reader of GQ or Omni might be interested in). As usual his work verges towards veneration for mysticism.
At the end of the day he should have marshalled his forces with more discipline and spent the time on making this into a serious work that it should be, and as Bruno deserves. It appears that he merely cranked this one out. He will pay for this as readers such as I will never buy another of his books.
Back to the Thompson Twins Mr. White!
Rating: 
Summary: About the man and his suffering, not his ideas
Review: Michael White succeeds in personalizing the heretic monk Giordano Bruno, giving us a more complete picture of the man than we find in other sources. His book educates us about the social, political, and religious environment in which Bruno lectured and wrote. We also feel his suffering at the hands of the Inquisition. Unfortunately, we learn less about Bruno's ideas, which covered a remarkably wide range of speculations. We are given only shorthand versions. White's writing is very readable, but one sometimes wonders if all of it is based on documented fact. For example, he writes that "A sudden hush fell over the room; the judges sat motionless. Bruno, his confidence clearly ebbing away, his energy almost drained, looked around the room once more, seeing the still faces, the eyes of witnesses quickly averted." How does White know all these details? Passages like this read as if the author were using literary invention to make the dry records of the Inquisition more interesting.
Rating:
Summary: About the man and his suffering, not his ideas
Review: Michael White succeeds in personalizing the heretic monk Giordano Bruno, giving us a more complete picture of the man than we find in other sources. His book educates us about the social, political, and religious environment in which Bruno lectured and wrote. We also feel his suffering at the hands of the Inquisition. Unfortunately, we learn less about Bruno's ideas, which covered a remarkably wide range of speculations. We are given only shorthand versions. White's writing is very readable, but one sometimes wonders if all of it is based on documented fact. For example, he writes that "A sudden hush fell over the room; the judges sat motionless. Bruno, his confidence clearly ebbing away, his energy almost drained, looked around the room once more, seeing the still faces, the eyes of witnesses quickly averted." How does White know all these details? Passages like this read as if the author were using literary invention to make the dry records of the Inquisition more interesting.
Rating:
Summary: You'll Get More from an Encyclopedia
Review: Take one of the most fascinating topics in Renaissance history and give it to the most inexperienced History Channel screenwriter -- you know: the ones who don't have too much to say, and consequently repeat every thin fact endlessly -- and you have this book. After having read it, I know no more than if I had read the Encyclopedia Britannica entry for Giordano Bruno. I was not only uninformed but bored as well. The only reason I finished the book at all is that I couldn't believe that the author went so far with so little data. Firstly, I would like to know more about Giordano Bruno's contribution to Renaissance thought. Although some Italian sources were referenced in the notes and bibliography, I am not convinced that White actually tackled them himself. Secondly, I would not have minded some more apropos quotes from Bruno himself -- even if it meant padding the book a bit -- anything but the endless repetition of a few basic biographical facts. It appears that Michael White has written other books on the general subject of scientific history, books that garnered some decent reviews. I sincerely hope that this was just an odd lapsus menti and not the sign of a fourth-rate biographer.
Rating: 
Summary: To think is to speculate with images?
Review: The quote that is at the head of these comments is from the subject of Michael White's new book Giordano Bruno, "The Pope And The Heretic". The same thought was to send him and almost unimaginable numbers to the most evil tortures ever devised, and usually to forms of death that have not been outdone by even today's cruelty. One statistic that is offered by the writer is that The Inquisition put to death 1,000,000 people, including men women and children. At the time this represented 1 out of every 200 people then living on Earth. Using the number of 6 billion for today's population of our planet, this murderous spree would slaughter some 30 million souls today. The power behind these numbers that should be incomprehensible becomes instantly clear when the power that decreed this historic slaughter is named, The Catholic Church. Or perhaps in a macro view of history, religion in general, but here the evil radiated from Rome. Thinking was forbidden unless you repeated what the Church deemed to be the truth. Speculating would get you maimed and killed, and living and conducting yourself like any of the inquisitors or many of the Popes would also have ended you life. The Ten Commandments have nothing to do with those that ran, and in many cases still run the church. To this day The Vatican will only say that it deeply regrets the torture and killing of Bruno, and not only is he not pardoned, those who tormented him were in many instances Canonized, granted Sainthood. The idea that these sadists can hold the same place that Mother Teresa will inevitably rise to is vulgar, obscene, and nauseating. So, 400 years has passed and how is this man who inspired and influenced men like Galileo, Isaac Newton, and men like Niels Bohr, and Werner Heisenberg in the 20th Century now viewed by The Vatican? Well the The Vatican has one document on its site, and that only in Italian, not a word in English or even Polish. The Catholic Encyclopedia describes him thusly, "his system of thought is an incoherent materialistic pantheism", an idea that was nonsense 4 centuries ago remains so today, one cannot fault dogmatics for lack of consistency! It also must be noted that obfuscation is still the preferred manner of communicating ideas that the Church would rather have as few people understand as possible. Thinking and or speculating with images is as intolerable now as it was when the fire was lit under Giordano. What can one expect from those who brought you the St. Bartholomew's Massacre? Michael White's book is fascinatingly compact, but it is massive in both breadth and depth. Giordano Bruno and others, that like him were willing to question absurdities and the hypocrites that espoused them are owed a debt, by all who dare to think and to speculate, in word, deed, and image.
Rating:
Summary: Reads like a cheap Hollywood novel rather than history
Review: This book, like many historical works published in the last several decades, is intellectually dishonest. The very first page White tells us the pope "remembered fondly the attentions of his lover earlier that morning". This reads like a cheap Hollywood novel rather than a quality historical book. History can be fascinating and the story interesting without resorting to cheap fabrications such as this. How does Mr. White know what the pope was thinking that morning? Very poorly done. Unfortunately this book would be worthwhile for the Vatican as ...[burnable material]..., and nothing else.
Rating:
Summary: Avoid this fetid rehash.
Review: This is a horrible book. I checked it out from my local library because I didn't have much faith in it, and I was sorry I even wasted my time reading it. Who does this book serve? For those who know anything about Giordano Bruno, it is a waste of time. And those who don't know anything about him might be discouraged by how poorly-written this book is, and thus decide not to look further into Giordano Bruno or his philosophy. Only the most titilating aspects of Bruno's execution at the stake are really described with any detail in this book. Michael White doesn't really explain anything about Bruno's complex philosophical system, based upon the Art of Memory and founded through the Renaissance perspective that ancient wisdom had more to offer than the modern knowledge of the time. Bruno intuited that the sun was the center of our solar system and that the earth was only one of an infinite number of planets, not through data compiled by looking through a telescope, but by reading ancient texts -- from Plotinus to Nicholas of Cusa and others -- and picked out the parts that made sense to him. He then syntesized these ideas into a coherent worldview that reflected his perception of the world around him. In the work On the Composition of Images, Signs and Ideas, Bruno's discussion about images and ideas the humans construct in their minds and how they relate to the actual objects themselves can be seen as a precursor to semiotics. If you are looking for a biography of Bruno in English, then read Giordano Bruno: His Life And Thought by Dorothea Waley Singer. It is out of print, but might be out there still on the internet. The writing is clear, it avoids sensationalistic descriptions of bloodshed (unlike Michael White), and has a more firm understanding of Bruno's philosophy. If you are looking for inspired attempts to place Bruno's philosophical system within the context of other streams of thought in Renaissance Europe, then look into Giordano Bruno and the Hermetic Tradition and/or The Art of Memory, both of which are by Frances Yates. The main drawback with these books by Yates is that she thinks of everything as "Hermetic." Their are Cabalistic influences in Bruno's thought, and Yates doesn't always bring that out in her analyses. But there are other books available that follow up on the good scholarship in Yates, and question her bold enthusiasms when they overstep the evidence. Such works are Eros and Magic in the Renaissance by Ioan Couliano, the book by Hilary Gatti -- which analyzes how he operated as a scientist and not just a philosopher, and Giordano Bruno and the Philosophy of the Ass by Nuccio Ordine -- which tries to place his theory of the path to wisdom through ignorance in a well-established tradition. If you want to read Bruno's work itself, there are many of his works available in English, including the Rabelaisian and bawdy play, The Candlebearer, published by Dovehouse Editions in Canada, as well as his more philosophically mature dialogues, The Ash Wednesday Supper, The Expulsion of the Triumphant Beast, and The Cabala of Pegasus. In short, anyone expressing even the slightest interest in any aspect of Giordano Bruno should look elsewhere, and avoid this book by Michael White.
Rating:
Summary: Lightweight Treatment of Heavyweight Subject Matter
Review: This is the story of the under-appreciated philosopher and scientist Giordano Bruno, who was executed by the Roman Inquisition for exercising free anti-church thought. A very specific historical episode like this requires hard history and scholarship, but Michael White writes as if this is a general interest story for a general audience. Therefore this treatment is nonsensical from the outset. White fails to deliver the goods on any of the important areas influenced by Bruno's story, and the book flies over a great many interesting areas of subject matter but lands in none of them. The key flaw in the book is White's attempt to place Bruno's work in a historical context, which merely results in disjointed coverage of his actual philosophy and extremely unconvincing attempts to show Bruno's supposedly vast influence on figures like Galileo, Shakespeare, and Spinoza. White takes the opportunity to cover, in two short chapters, the evolution and history of scientific and religious thought in Europe (chapters II and III), but these treatments are far too basic too be of much use, and show the writing style of a quick high school research paper. White even assumes that he's qualified to call the works of Aristotle "amateurish." Another possibility that is squandered is deeper insight into the causes and effects of the Inquisition, but White only provides a basic reporter's coverage of Bruno's trial. Worst yet is the biographical aspect of the book, as the story of Bruno's life is out of order and fragmented. His actual philosophical and scientific works, which should be the centerpiece of the book, are given short shrift, especially his important attempts at unified knowledge rather than specialization. White fails as a biographer as he includes the supposed private thoughts and opinions of Bruno and the other players in the story, men who have been dead for centuries and didn't write autobiographies. This is unprofessional and quite impossible to take seriously. In the end, we are left with little knowledge of Bruno the man and his potentially important story, so one must wonder about the very point of the book. Not recommended.
Rating:
Summary: Perfecting Pontius Pilate
Review: Understanding this book as a cheap detective novel is playing to the down side of things. If you really want to like this book, try thinking of the song, "True Colors" by Tom Kelly and Billy Steinberg, most famously done by Cyndi Lauper and available with a lot of popular hits on the CD "Twelve Deadly Cyns." The first line of that song, "You with the sad eyes," also reminds me of the poem "Woman, Why Do You Weep?" at the end of HUNDRED WHITE DAFFODILS by Jane Kenyon, which was not published during Jane's lifetime and will never be as famous as a pop hit like "True Colors" (I remember some Paris concert where the crowd could sing the words to "True Colors," and you could see it on videotape, but you can only get the regular video on DVD). Typically emotional in that song is the line, "If this world makes you crazy and you've taken all you can bear, you call me up because you know I'll be there." (Copyright 1986, and this isn't really fair use of those lyrics, because this is not a paid, professional commercial for the contents of that song.) Fortunately for our sanity, the church of our times is no longer imposing punishments in a manner which might now be more expected from secret military tribunals or the war on drugs as waged outside the jurisdiction of the world's greatest superpower. In THE POPE & THE HERETIC by Michael White, the church at Rome seems to have learned from the Bible how to excuse itself in the manner of Pontius Pilate, and its official condemnation of Giordano Bruno on February 8, 1600 required another hearing on the same day. "This hearing was called because the Holy See never sentenced heretics to the stake directly; with characteristic hypocrisy it always passed that duty on to a civil authority. The official statement from the Holy Office to the governor of Rome was invariable: `Take him [the heretic] under your jurisdiction, subject to your decision, so as to be punished with the due chastisement; beseeching you, however, as we do earnestly beseech you, so to mitigate the severity of your sentence with respect to his body that there may be no danger of death or of the shedding of blood. So we Cardinals, Inquisitor and General, whose names are written beneath decree.' This statement was effectively an order to the secular court. They were to take Bruno and burn him alive." (pp. 4-5). Only after sentence had been passed did the bishop of Sidonia take away his priest's insignia "and condemned his soul to suffer the perpetual flames of Hell, symbolically degrading his spirit just as the flames would degrade his physical body. The cardinals and the secular judges wanted to erase the very essence of this heretic, just as of all heretics." (p. 5). The rest of the book attempts to describe the true colors of Bruno in terms that a popular audience, certainly not as committed to the laws of science or jurisprudence as professionals in those fields would be, can easily understand. The society of the late 16th century was exciting in a lot of ways, and this book attempts to capture that excitement more than any philosophical doctrine or memory techniques that Bruno had developed. Even modern science is only mentioned as an average person might be able to picture it. "To a degree, scientists began to conceptualize as Bruno had done, rather than only as Galileo had taught them. . . . The best example of this comes from the work of one of the greatest thinkers of the twentieth century, Richard Feynman, who created what have become known as Feynmann diagrams, pictorial representations of complex subnuclear transactions. And Bruno's vision of picture logic is actually used by almost everyone in the industrialized world each day, for we live in a world dominated by computers, and computers are machines that generate images." (p. 197). My favorite part of this book is about Giovanni Mocenigo, who invited Bruno to Venice in 1591. (p. 35). There were "three popes between the death of Sixtus V in August 1590 and the accession of Clement VIII in February 1592," (p. 36, n. 1) providing the kind of confusion in which "we can only assume magnified self-confidence and an exaggerated sense of self-worth provided him with the strength he needed. He was blind to the genuine dangers and believed he would find acceptance and leniency." (p. 37). As a superpower, America seemed to feel the same way after WWII, just before Americans stopped talking about the real situation. To get his work printed, Bruno had to go to Frankfurt. He was packing on May 22, 1592, when Mocenigo "began to complain that I had not taught him what I promised. Then he used threats saying he would find means, if I did not remain of my own free will, to compel me." (p. 44). America has been about that unlucky, trying to teach the rest of the world what democracy is supposed to be like, when Americans themselves are prevented from interfering with operations of the CIA or whatever else passes for American foreign policy in the dark corners of the night. You might find some other lesson in this book if you are reading it in a prison while serving time for possession of some illegal substance, but it ought to be showing you the true color of something.
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