Cleopatra: A Life

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 internal monologue would often go, “Yes, but how do you KNOW that? What source did you use? I don't want to thumb through the epic notes section in the back, I want to know NOW” (to be clear, I read all the notes, and found them quite worthwhile, it just involved a lot of page turning). All my griping aside, I was glad for the trip back through history, much of which I hadn't actually known in particularly much detail before. Schiff is also blessed with an eye for detail, combined with an ability not to get so enamored with all the jewel-encrusted whatevers in Cleopatra's history that she forgot to tell a good story.

Dry, dry, dry! I wanted to like this book I really really did want to. I guess I am a history nerd but I have loved anything ancient history, Greece, Rome, Egypt etc since I was only around 8 years old. I just couldn't enjoy this novel. I tried to think of it as a text book and still...could not force myself through excruciatingly detailed accounts of minutia with no apparent reason for their inclusion. Below is a quote from another GoodReads review by Elizabeth:

...“I also found boring the detailed accounts of the Ptolemies' intermarriages, of the ruthless executions of family members in line of succession, and of the conflict brought on by the Macedonia ancestry of the Ptolemies, including Cleopatra, simply because there are other sources for this.”...

You are correct Elizabeth. Such accounts had me studying the backs of my eyelids instead of the written page.

I'll start by saying that I had high hopes for this book and the hopes were both realized and not realized.

I thought this book might be my favorite read of 2010 and it wasn't, but it was a good read. A good read but not a great read.

What bothered me about this book was that Schiff tries to collect all the known information about Cleopatra and her times and to dispell the myths, yet there is really very little information about Cleopatra. What information there is often contradicts other information about Cleopatra.

I came away from this book knowing very little new about this woman and knowing very little that was certain.