I loved this book. I am not alone. It was perhaps the best-reviewed book of the year in any genre. The great revelation of this volume is not so much what it tells us about the last great queen of Egypt -- she is, after all, one of a handful of women in human history that is still fascinating, despite the near-absence of primary sources of information about her life -- but about Schiff’s ability as a storyteller.She is an authoritative and supremely elegant writer. Really, if you have never liked a biography, try this one.
Schiff’s command of her material impressive, but it is her quietly dramatic writing style, the sentences often building on each other, that is so engaging. “Alexandria is flatter today than it was in Cleopatra's lifetime,” begins one of these mounting sequences. “It is oblivious to its ancient street plan; it no longer gleams white. The Nile is nearly two miles farther east. The dust, the sultry sea air, Alexandria’s melting purple sunsets, are unchanged. Human nature remains remarkably consistent, the physics of history immutable. Firsthand accounts continue to diverge wildly. For well over two thousand years, a myth has been able to outrun and outlive a fact.”
And so it goes--the woman who bore children by two of the most powerful men of her age, Julius Caesar and Marc Anthony, while she led her country in a time of peril is still a wonderful story.
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