Stacy Schiff
Hardcover | Pages: 369 pages Rating: 3.67 | 94499 Users | 5113 Reviews
Present Books Conducive To Cleopatra: A Life
| Original Title: | Cleopatra: A Life |
| ISBN: | 0316001929 (ISBN13: 9780316001922) |
| Edition Language: | English URL https://www.littlebrown.com/titles/stacy-schiff/cleopatra/9780316001922/ |
| Characters: | Cleopatra |
| Setting: | Alexandria(Egypt) Ptolemaic Egypt(Egypt) |
| Literary Awards: | PEN/Jacqueline Bograd Weld Award for Biography (2011), Goodreads Choice Award Nominee for History and Biography (2010) |
Chronicle As Books Cleopatra: A Life
The Pulitzer Prize-winning biographer brings to life the most intriguing woman in the history of the world: Cleopatra, the last queen of Egypt. Her palace shimmered with onyx, garnets, and gold, but was richer still in political and sexual intrigue. Above all else, Cleopatra was a shrewd strategist and an ingenious negotiator. Though her life spanned fewer than forty years, it reshaped the contours of the ancient world. She was married twice, each time to a brother. She waged a brutal civil war against the first when both were teenagers. She poisoned the second. Ultimately she dispensed with an ambitious sister as well; incest and assassination were family specialties. Cleopatra appears to have had sex with only two men. They happen, however, to have been Julius Caesar and Mark Antony, among the most prominent Romans of the day. Both were married to other women. Cleopatra had a child with Caesar and–after his murder–three more with his protégé. Already she was the wealthiest ruler in the Mediterranean; the relationship with Antony confirmed her status as the most influential woman of the age. The two would together attempt to forge a new empire, in an alliance that spelled their ends. Cleopatra has lodged herself in our imaginations ever since. Famous long before she was notorious, Cleopatra has gone down in history for all the wrong reasons. Shakespeare and Shaw put words in her mouth. Michelangelo, Tiepolo, and Elizabeth Taylor put a face to her name. Along the way, Cleopatra’s supple personality and the drama of her circumstances have been lost. In a masterly return to the classical sources, Stacy Schiff here boldly separates fact from fiction to rescue the magnetic queen whose death ushered in a new world order. Rich in detail, epic in scope, Schiff ‘s is a luminous, deeply original reconstruction of a dazzling life.Mention Appertaining To Books Cleopatra: A Life
| Title | : | Cleopatra: A Life |
| Author | : | Stacy Schiff |
| Book Format | : | Hardcover |
| Book Edition | : | Deluxe Edition |
| Pages | : | Pages: 369 pages |
| Published | : | November 1st 2010 by Little, Brown and Company |
| Categories | : | Biography. History. Nonfiction. Historical |
Rating Appertaining To Books Cleopatra: A Life
Ratings: 3.67 From 94499 Users | 5113 ReviewsAssessment Appertaining To Books Cleopatra: A Life
"When Egypt Ruled the East" by George Steindorff this book is not.I have read many books on Egyptian history all the way up through the Ptolemies who, somehow, through some sort of rhetorical magic, were made to be as dry and dull as dead leaves in winter in "Cleopatra: A Life." I have read many history books. I consider myself a bit of a connoisseur of the genre. I even inhale historical fiction. Some of these books have been utter and complete crap. I have manned up and finished books that"In one of the busiest afterlives in history she has gone on to become an asteroid, a video game, a cliché, a cigarette, a slot machine, a strip club, a synonym for Elizabeth Taylor. Shakespeare attested to Cleopatra's infinite variety. He had no idea." In the opening pages of CLEOPATRA: A LIFE, Stacy Schiff sets the tone for what is to follow, and frankly, I found it all, from the first page to the last, to be utterly and sublimely intoxicating. Schiff's reverence for Cleopatra and the umbrage
The number one most read and liked review of this book on this site is completely off-base and this review is pretty much going to be a defense of Cleopatra in response to Elizabeth Sulzby's unfair mischaracterization of the work (beginning with her ludicrous shelving of the piece as "historicalfiction"). As someone trained in the art of history research and writing, a history teacher, and a published historian, I found Cleopatra impressive and an eloquent piece of first-rate scholarship. Schiff
Like everyone with even a passing interest in history I thought I knew a little bit about Cleopatra, but Stacy Schiff's Biography quickly disabused me of that notion! It turned out that like most people, I had taken the oft repeated myths of thousands of years for fact. The most surprising fact I learned was that she was Macedonian and not Egyptian! I was very embarrassed to find out that I had placed both she and Cesar about 1250 years in time before they actually lived! In my judgment, one of
Perhaps of all the historic characters we think we know, but dont, Cleopatra ranks at the top of the list. Sometimes a legend is so well-known that we lose track of the fact that a real human being was living this story, fighting these battles, and harboring these emotions. What an extraordinary person she must have been to have lived through so much in her short thirty-nine years and to have influenced history in the way that she did. First fact that I did not know. She was Cleopatra VII.
I labelled this one as "feministy," because I don't think that Stacy Schiff could deny her "let's re-examine Cleopatra's ACTUAL awesomeness as opposed to this hyper-sexualized harpy-witch-seductress-harlot nonsense" angle. Pulitzer Prize-winning past or no, Schiff delivers fluff here. Good fluff, feminist as opposed to misogynistic fluff, but fluff nonetheless. Grad school is starting to ruin me for reading things that aren't in academic journals; after Schiff would state a presumed fact, my
First and foremost this is a history book. The plot is taken from real time 2,000 years ago. It hasn't been bloated with fantastical elements or intense drama. In fact, if you were reading this book as you would a work of fiction, you'll find yourself sadly lacking that same kind of connection to Cleopatra as you would to a main character in a novel. Why? Because Cleopatra is nearly unknowable. And she's not a fictional character. She's spoken of from a distance, seen more through the eyes of
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