Cleopatra: A Life by Stacy Schiff
I knew next to nothing about Cleopatra going into this one. I know she lead Egypt at some point and had an affair with Marc Antony and that all of this caused a Mediterranean kerfuffle in the time of the Roman Empire. But I couldn’t say what her power was or what era she lived in or any of that. I couldn’t even guess, not even taking material from the wildly inaccurate plays and movies about her as I’ve seen none. So it felt good […]
Cleopatra, A Life by Stacey Schiff
When in Egypt, amirite? I was going to pit this as a battle of two Cleopatra books with the Shakespeare play but it turns out I had a lot to say so I ended up splitting them. For the best I think, as they’re both so different- Shakespeare’s play is one layer in the myths of this real historical woman that Schiff is trying to dig through. In that context, Shakespeare is maybe one of the best known mythmakers; his play helped carry the myth […]
Cleopatra: Her History, Her Myth by Francine Prose
Francine Prose tells the story of Cleopatra (VII Philopater, if you want to be specific), her entanglement with the Roman Empire, and how she has become distorted in cultural depictions after her death. In a way, I am reading this book in preparation – I’ve got the reading of a retelling of Cleopatra’s life set in space (!) coming up, and I figured that I’d appreciate it more if I gave myself a better grounding of the historical subject matter first. Also, I’ve always found […]
DIsappearance of a Scribe by Dana Stabenow
Bingo 4: New Before I saw Disappearance of a Scribe in the library, I had heard of neither The Eye of Isis series nor its author Dana Stabenow. This is both a new to me series and author; it turns out this is actually book 2 of the series, but it seems pretty stand alone as well. What we’ve got is detective fiction in a historical fiction setting. Due circumstances from the previous book which we mostly don’t need to know, Tetisheri has become the […]
“It is not difficult to understand why Caesar became history, Cleopatra a legend.” I heard of this book thanks to The Daily Show. I love bios about royal women and the author is obviously super-smart. So I went out and bought the book, and I promptly left it unread for a couple of years. (That’s a bad habit of mine.) The whole kerfuffle over Sony’s film adaptation brought it back to my attention. Stacy Schiff gleefully debunks everything you thought you knew about Cleopatra. No, she wasn’t Egyptian. Not only was she Greek, she came from the same Macedonian stock […]
