Description
By (author) Schiff Stacy
Short /annotation:
Cleopatra”s palace shimmered with onyx and gold but was richer still in political and sexual intrigue. Stacy Schiff boldly separates fact from fiction to rescue the magnetic queen whose death ushered in a new world order, a generation before the birth of Christ.
:
Cleopatra”s palace shimmered with onyx and gold but was richer still in political and sexual intrigue. Though her life spanned fewer than forty years, it reshaped the contours of the ancient world.
Famous long before she was notorious, Cleopatra has gone down in history for all the wrong reasons. Stacy Schiff boldly separates fact from fiction to rescue the magnetic queen whose death ushered in a new world order, a generation before the birth of Christ. Rich in detail, epic in scope, Schiff”s is a luminous reconstruction of a dazzling life.
Review quote:
Under [Schiff”s] pen, the mirage of Cleopatra shimmers down the deserts of time and suddenly stands before us, in
new and thrilling sharp focus … full of well researched context and much learned speculation
Review quote:
We see a great queen painted in dazzling colours in the twilight of a dazzling kingdom … new life is breathed into an indisputably authentic icon
Review quote:
An inspired combination of carefully parsed texts, new research and pulse-quickening descriptive writing … a formidable and spellbinding achievement
Review quote:
[Schiff] writes
elegantly and wittily …
truly evocative
Review quote:
Energetic, evocative … Schiff has produced
a highly literary, imaginative, coherent narrative
Review quote:
A real page-turner bursting with intrigue and suspense
Review quote:
Schiff, the Pulitzer Prize-winning biographer of Véra Nabokov, set out to the extract the real Cleopatra from the mythic figure…. Schiff”s learning is immense, but worn lightly and with an assured grasp of human nature
Review quote:
In [Stacy Schiff”s]
terrific new biography of history”s favorite sex-crazed, power-mad hussy, called simply Cleopatra,
Schiff tosses out centuries” worth of envy, misogyny, and plain old snark to unearth the brilliant Macedonian ruler and restore the golden luster of Cleopatra VII”s reign in Egypt
Review quote:
Schiff excavates truth from myth with vivid eloquence, taking us back to a life in a time and place that was both ”an orgy of pillage and murder” and ”the Paris of the ancient world”…
Schiff”s portrayal brings to life a charismatic figure who spoke eight languages fluently, and for 22 years, until her legendarily gruesome death, ruled a glittering city-state of astronomical wealth
Review quote:
Startling. Rarely have so distant a time and obscured a place come so powerfully to life. A great achievement
Biographical note:
Stacey Schiff is a Pulitzer Prize winning biographer. Her essays and articles have appeared in The New Yorker, The New York Times Book Review and The Times Literary Supplement and she has also received fellowships from the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation and the National Endowment for the Humanities. In 2000 Schiff won the Pulitzer Prize for her biography of Vera Nabokov. She was also a finalist for the 1995 Pulitzer Prize for Saint-Exupéry: A Biography about Antoine de Saint Exupéry. In 2006 she received an Academy Award in Literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. She lives in New York City and Edmonton, Alberta.
Promotional headline:
The massive bestselling life story of Cleopatra, Queen of Egypt – 350,000 hardbacks sold in 22 weeks on New York Times List
Reviews
There are no reviews yet.