Kathryn Harrison
Although it's not Schiff's purpose to present us with a feminist revision of a life plucked from antiquity, in order to "restore" Cleopatra—to see her at all—one must strip away an "encrusted myth" created by those for whom "citing her sexual prowess was evidently less discomfiting than acknowledging her intellectual gifts"…It's dizzying to contemplate the thicket of prejudices, personalities and propaganda Schiff penetrated to reconstruct a woman whose style, ambition and audacity make her a subject worthy of her latest biographer. After all, Stacy Schiff's writing is distinguished by those very same virtues.
—The New York Times Book Review
Marie Arana
If you think two millennia of dusty research and hoary legend have told us all we need to know about this woman, you're in for a surprise. Stacy Schiff…has dug through the earliest sources on Cleopatra, sorted through myth and misapprehension, tossed out the chaff of gossip, and delivered up a spirited life…for all its splendor of detail, Schiff's book is a model of concision, and its brisk, vividly written chapters move with a swiftness the Nile never enjoyed…a great, glorious spree of a story.
—The Washington Post
Michiko Kakutani
…captivating…a cinematic portrait of a historical figure far more complex and compelling than any fictional creation, and a wide, panning, panoramic picture of her world…Ms. Schiff seems to have inhaled everything there is to know about Cleopatra and her times, and she uses her authoritative knowledge of the era—and her instinctive understanding of her central players—to assess shrewdly probable and possible motives and outcomes…Ms. Schiff also demonstrates a magician's ability to conjure the worlds her subject inhabited with fluent sleight of hand.
—The New York Times
Publishers Weekly
From its opening strains of music, this audiobook of Schiff's stellar biography of the Egyptian queen rewards the intellect and the senses. As Schiff dusts away history's spider webs, romance's distortions, and sexism's corruptions to reveal the true (or at least the truest possible) portrait of Cleopatra, Robin Miles's voice is deep, confiding, the perfect instrument to introduce a history that has been variously forgotten, misunderstood, or suppressed. Her enunciation is crisp, her pacing pure charm: she wrings every sentence for meaning, irony, and wit, taking us through pages of description or analysis with a stately pace. A Little, Brown hardcover. (Nov.)
From the Publisher
"Stacy Schiff does a rare thing: She gives us a book we'd miss if it didn't exist."—Wall Street Journal
"A masterpiece."—Daily Beast
Amanda Foreman
"What a brilliant book. Stacy Schiff has written a masterpiece."
Joseph J. Ellis
"This is a book to savor. Schiff has given a genuine jolt to the recent surge of interest in Franklin, along the way demonstrating why she is generally regarded as one of the most gifted storytellers writing today."
Anita Shreve
"Schiff's sentences are magnificent, deceptively complex, full of insight and fact and distance and wry humor, so that every page is a kind of mini feast."
David McCullough
"Superb, spirited, enthralling. For anyone who enjoys a fascinating life-story well told, this is a book not to be missed."
Washington Examiner
"[An] excellent, myth-busting biography....No one will think of Cleopatra in quite the same way after reading this vivid, provocative book."
Vogue
"Hugely compelling...Schiff sifts through gauzy mythology to uncover a brilliant young woman."
Natasha Clark
"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.'"
Caryn James
"[A] dazzling, meticulous biography."
Laura Miller
"[Schiff] writes against the fabulous grain...There are countless books about Cleopatra, but this one, I suspect, would have been one of her favorites."
Michael Korda
"Stacy Schiff has managed to create a masterpiece."
Miranda Seymour
"[A] magnificent re-creation of both an extraordinary woman, and her times...No previous image, visual or verbal, matches up to the inspiring, frightening, ruthless woman conjured by Schiff from an inspired combination of carefully parsed texts, new research, and pulse-quickening descriptive writing....Schiff uses a method that borrows much from the cinema. Zooming in on a dramatic event, she then pulls back to reveal the larger picture; the back story; the setting....Schiff proves brilliant at peeling away the layers of myth in which earlier storytellers shrouded the Egyptian queen."
Marc Vincent
"What makes [Cleopatra] so compelling is Schiff's masterful evocation of broader questions: the roles of women in Egyptian and Roman societies; the annual cycles of the Egyptian economy, so dependent on the Nile; and the famous and incomparable library of Alexandria, a bustling ancient city...riveting."
Rick Riordan
"Stacy Schiff is that rare combination: a first-rate historian and a brilliant storyteller. Using a wide range of sources, she spins straw into gold, conjuring the world of Ptolemaic Egypt in full vibrant color, and returning the voice of one of the most powerful, fascinating, and maligned women in history. CLEOPATRA is impossible to put down."
John McMurtrie
"An engrossing and well-researched biography, full of delicious details."
Susannah Cahalan
"Engaging and meticulously researched."
Carmela Ciuraru
"An extraordinary achievement in biography. [Schiff's] book explores themes of female ambition and power-issues that seem just as vexing now as they did 2,000 years ago....Along with tracing Cleopatra's rise to power, her loss of Caesar (by assassination) and Mark Antony (to suicide) and the epic story of her empire, this biography is filled with fascinating and amusing details of the era....Lacking any primary sources whatsoever, it is admirable that Schiff could create such a drama-filled and accessible narrative, especially one so rich in detail. It's true that Cleopatra's story has long been 'constructed as much of male fear as fantasy,' but with Cleopatra, Schiff has produced a compelling and authoritative correction in its place."
Lisa Orkin Emmanuel
"It's as though Cleopatra lives and breathes once again in the pages of Stacy Schiff's exquisitely researched and well-written Cleopatra: A Life. The book injects the Egyptian queen with a complexity and humanity that has long since been forgotten....[it] glows with details."
Mary Ann Gwinn
"[Schiff] portrays Cleopatra as the ambitious and talented ruler she was and puts her affairs with Caesar and Mark Antony in their proper political context. The Romans, the early writers of Cleopatra's history, portrayed her as a lascivious power-grabbing hussy. But Schiff works hard and successfully to get beyond the anti-Cleopatra propaganda."
Angie Drobnic Holan
"For the past 2,000 years or so, history has painted a sexy, scheming veneer on the queen of Egypt known as Cleopatra, so discarding the propaganda is no easy task. But Stacy Schiff's new biography scrapes away the grime to reveal a smart political strategist, a first-rate military contractor, a proud mother and a witty conversationalist. It's a startling, invigorating look at a history that has mostly blamed Cleopatra for the fall of great Romans....The most pleasing sense of Schiff's biography is a fine sense of balance. She reminds us of the particulars of the ancient world we might have forgotten, but she also assumes we have some familiarity with world history and doesn't get bogged down in the basics.... She is authoritative while open to other interpretations. And she answers fun questions, like what happened to the wives of Julius Caesar and Mark Antony while the men were hanging out with Cleopatra.... Schiff's restoration reveals a finer portrait of the woman known as Cleopatra."
Meredith Maran
"Vivid...Schiff offers and equally colorful history of Egypt, ca. 30 B.C....she reveals a Cleopatra we've not yet seen: a fierce, sensuous and complicated queen who ruled in a time and place as fascinating as she was."
Jenny McPhee
"Schiff impressively recreates the myth of Cleopatra while deconstructing the legend and unveiling its sources -- a handwritten word, a few coins, sparse first-hand testimony, many second-third-fourth hand accounts, and plenty of gossip....Schiff efficiently and entertainingly debunks attempts by historians, poets, politicians, and playwrights (all male) throughout the ages to reduce Cleopatra to a nymphomaniac with a diadem....Stacy Schiff's eloquent, important book makes it eminently clear that the Cleopatra phenomenon throughout the ages has less to do with the Egyptian queen's extraordinary accomplishments as a ruler and politician, than to the pervasive and apparently eradicable male fear of powerful women."
Kevin Nance
"Magnificent...Never in 30 years of reading biographies have I encountered so much limpid, authoritative and supremely elegant writing sustained so consistently. I drooled over nearly every sentence; to single out the juicy parts would be to recite the text entire. Schiff's command of her material is Olympian, her manner quietly dramatic, the sentences often building on each other like movements of a symphony....the best book of the year."
Alan Cheuse
"One of the most highly praised nonfiction books of the autumn. Schiff deftly separates fact from legend, legend from poetry, and creates a model of methodology and compelling story. She re-creates a place and time in a praiseworthy leap from scholarship to narration."
Stephen Sondheim
"Stacy Schiff has created a masterpiece and firmly cemented a new Cleopatra in our minds--one who had enough sex appeal to sleep with the two most powerful men in the world, Julius Caesar and Mark Antony....eminently readable."
Maureen Dowd
"Enthralling."
Tina Brown
"Cleopatra is a fascinating woman and always has been. Stacy Schiff, who is a brilliant writer, has created a book that is so well-written that it's almost like a novel in its juicy literary flair...The city [of Alexandria] is evoked so brilliantly...Wonderful stuff."
Judith Thurman
"Exceptionally artful...Imaginative attunement with a subject, however, does not have to compromise a vigilant biographer's critical detachment, and Schiff's beautiful writing hums with that tension...ambitious...It is an edifice of speculation and conjecture--like every Cleopatra ever written. But unlike nearly all of them it is a work of literature."
Liz Smith
"The most compelling biography of the year....Miss Schiff can really write....persuasive and entertaining."
Mary Pols
"In Cleopatra: A Life, Stacy Schiff is authoritative and confident...Schiff makes a convincing case against the traditional, male-chauvinist take on Cleopatra as a power-hungry seductress. It's a stance that puts her at odds with 2,000 years' worth of Cleopatra chronicles, and she's aware of it."
Wendy Smith
"Superb...Cleopatra led an epic life, and Schiff captures its sweep and scope in a vigorous narrative aimed at the general reader yet firmly anchored in modern scholarship. The author's greatest strengths remain the lucid intelligence and subtle analysis of personality...Schiff reanimates [Cleopatra] as a living, breathing woman: utterly extraordinary, to be sure, but recognizably human."
Steve Donoghue
"[Stacy Schiff's] book is a masterpiece of lightly-worn learning and scintillating deduction. It's thrillingly, brazenly written. It rises in a single movement above the whole sea of Cleopatra biographies and gives us in some ways an entirely new woman for a new century....[Schiff] is the liveliest of narrators, going over every detail not only with an array of sources at her fingertips...but with an alert eye for the real, human story lurking under the ancient narratives. She cheerfully relates the propaganda of the era, but she is not fooled by it. She knows that virtually every detail she's relating could be false or falsified, but she relates them with a knowing exuberance anyway, since they're all we have....Reading her for page after enormously fun page, we're ashamed at how often we've been lectured into forgetting that history is first and always a story of people. This is a book full of living, savage, thriving, laughing, dying people."
Redbook
"Schiff uses her amazing descriptive powers to make the infamous queen's story even juicier....Cleopatra fascinates."
Ralph Eubanks
"Schiff rises to the challenge and creates an engaging biography by relentlessly stitching together the pieces of her subject's broader life and making connections between them...reveals through colorful details and clearly written prose."
Deirdre Donahue
"[Cleopatra] sizzles with passion, intrigue... Mixing contemporary sources, beautiful writing and psychological insight, Schiff makes us empathize with the heroine of this tale of togas, territorial conquest and hot love."
Sarah Ruden
"Stacy Schiff draws a portrait worthy of her subject's own wit and learning...Ms. Schiff manages to tell Cleopatra's story with a balance of the tragic and the hilarious...[and] does a rare thing: She gives us a book we'd miss if it didn't exist."
Joanne B. Mulcahy
"A rollicking good read... Schiff shares the talents that made her subject such a standout in her time: wit, rhetorical skill and keen intelligence."
Craig Seligman
"[Schiff] handles the politics of the ancient world from 48 to 30 BC with the immediacy she might bring to a book about the Clinton or Bush administrations...Schiff's enthralling book has its own feminist agenda: to save this 'capable, clear-eyed sovereign' from the slanders of history...More than a biography, Schiff has written a Fodor's of the ancient world, with stops in its most famous cities."
Anne Bartlett
"Schiff brings alive not only the personalities but the ambience of the gilded Hellenistic Middle East and still-crude Rome. Her writing beautifully evokes Cleopatra's stupendous capital Alexandria."
Louisa Thomas
"Startling. Rarely have so distant a time and obscured a place come so powerfully to life. It is a great achievement. It is also a provocative one. Faced with the perplexing question of how to write about a person when the evidence is sketchy and often misleading, Schiff has hit on an ingenious solution. She has written a biography in negative, describing the outlines of what she cannot know by brilliantly coloring around the queen."
Kimberly Cutter
"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....As gripping as the story of [Cleopatra's] 22-year reign over Egypt is (especially once Mark Antony arrives in his breastplate), the greatest pleasure comes from reading Schiff's lavishly detailed scenes of banquets (think roasted peacocks and storks), processions of elephants in golden slippers, and political intrigue. The Cleopatra who emerges had a talent for making an impression, a genius for diplomacy, and more flat-out Girl Power per pound than any woman before or since."
Good Housekeeping
"Refreshingly, [Cleopatra] looks beyond the myths and into the realities of Cleo's audacious empire-building."
Cullen Murphy
"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."
Mary Gordon
"Stacy Schiff's meticulous research, the depth and deftness of her portrayal, have given us a Cleopatra far richer and more satisfying than the myths and fantasies that we have mistaken for true nourishment. This Cleopatra is an invaluable contribution to our understanding of the history and lives of women."
Simon Winchester
"This is an astonishing, scrupulously researched, meticulously assembled retelling of one of the world's most famous lives--and it will become a classic."
Ron Chernow
"Even if forced to at gunpoint, Stacy Schiff would be incapable of writing a dull page or a lame sentence. Here she trains her satirical eye and sterling erudition on Cleopatra. Schiff's luminous prose evokes the ancient world with vivid splendor, whether it be the cosmopolitan charms of Alexandria or the murderous feuds of Rome. Her portraits of Julius Caesar and Mark Antony are fresh and provocative. Best of all, Cleopatra emerges as much more than the voluptuous seductress of legend and comes across as a shrewd, cunning, and highly competent monarch who knew how to thrive in a Mediterranean world of savage politics."
Tracy Kidder
"Cleopatra is buried under centuries of lies, and Stacy Schiff calls on her considerable powers to bring her back to life for us. With wit, clarity, and grace, Schiff has done what only the best writers can do: she has made the world new, again."
Jon Meacham
"An epic subject requires a writer of epic skill and scope, and we have a perfect pairing in Cleopatra and Stacy Schiff. Absorbing and illuminating, this new biography will endure."
Azar Nafisi
"What dazzles us in Stacy Schiff's Cleopatra are not the alluring mythologies about the evasive queen, but the astonishing if rare historical facts that Schiff has meticulously and lovingly excavated, linking one to the other like precious pieces of an ancient artifact. Cleopatra becomes 'real' as do the major (and minor) characters at her side. In language that is filled with insights and yet is seductive, lithe, and eloquent, Schiff offers not just Cleopatra's story but the story of an amazing era, one that has vanished but still affects us, questioning the way we look at myth, history and ourselves."
Kitty Kelley
"Stacy Schiff, a Pulitzer Prize winner, sets the gold standard for all biographers, and her latest, Cleopatra, is a feast--a mouth-watering feast."
Evan Thomas
"Great historians can make the discovery of the real story more exciting than the romantic myth. Stacy Schiff, a great historian as well as a wonderful writer, peels away the layers to reveal the true Cleopatra--a much more interesting woman than the Hollywood version, and, as it turns out, a formidable queen after all."
\Dan Vergano
"Wraps up classical scholarship about the famed Queen of the Nile into an enthralling tale"
The New York Times
Enthralling." (Maureen Dowd )
Publishers Weekly starred review
"[An] excellent, myth-busting biography...Schiff enters so completely into the time and place, especially the beauty and luxury of the 'great metropolis' of Alexandria, Cleopatra's capital, describing it in almost cinematic detail. And though we all know the outcome, Schiff's account of Cleopatra's and Antony's desperate efforts to manipulate their triumphant enemy, Octavian, make for tragic, page-turning reading. No one will think of Cleopatra in quite the same way after reading this vivid, provocative book."
More
"Stacy Schiff's dazzling, meticulous biography, Cleopatra, reclaims the queen from myth and gives her back her brain." (Caryn James)
Vanity Fair
"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." (Cullen Murphy)
Newsweek
"Startling. Rarely have so distant a time and obscured a place come so powerfully to life. It is a great achievement. It is also a provocative one. Faced with the perplexing question of how to write about a person when the evidence is sketchy and often misleading, Schiff has hit on an ingenious solution. She has written a biography in negative, describing the outlines of what she cannot know by brilliantly coloring around the queen." (Louisa Thomas)
Elle
"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." (Natasha Clark)
Marie Claire
"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....As gripping as the story of [Cleopatra's] 22-year reign over Egypt is (especially once Mark Antony arrives in his breastplate), the greatest pleasure comes from reading Schiff's lavishly detailed scenes of banquets (think roasted peacocks and storks), processions of elephants in golden slippers, and political intrigue. The Cleopatra who emerges had a talent for making an impression, a genius for diplomacy, and more flat-out Girl Power per pound than any woman before or since." (Kimberly Cutter )
Book Page
"Schiff brings alive not only the personalities but the ambience of the gilded Hellenistic Middle East and still-crude Rome. Her writing beautifully evokes Cleopatra's stupendous capital Alexandria." (Anne Bartlett)
Bloomberg News
"[Schiff] handles the politics of the ancient world from 48 to 30 BC with the immediacy she might bring to a book about the Clinton or Bush administrations...Schiff's enthralling book has its own feminist agenda: to save this 'capable, clear-eyed sovereign' from the slanders of history...More than a biography, Schiff has written a Fodor's of the ancient world, with stops in its most famous cities." (Craig Seligman)
The Sunday Oregonian
"A rollicking good read... Schiff shares the talents that made her subject such a standout in her time: wit, rhetorical skill and keen intelligence." (Joanne B. Mulcahy )
Salon.com
"Stacy Schiff...writes against the fabulous grain....For the discerning history buff, here is a biography of the most notorious woman of all time that's worldly, shrewd and indefatigable in its pursuit of the truth...There are countless books about Cleopatra, but this one, I suspect, would have been one of her favorites." (Laura Miller )
The Wall Street Journal
"Stacy Schiff draws a portrait worthy of her subject's own wit and learning...Ms. Schiff manages to tell Cleopatra's story with a balance of the tragic and the hilarious...[and] does a rare thing: She gives us a book we'd miss if it didn't exist." (Sarah Ruden)
Open Letters Monthly
"[Stacy Schiff's] book is a masterpiece of lightly-worn learning and scintillating deduction. It's thrillingly, brazenly written. It rises in a single movement above the whole sea of Cleopatra biographies and gives us in some ways an entirely new woman for a new century....[Schiff] is the liveliest of narrators, going over every detail not only with an array of sources at her fingertips...but with an alert eye for the real, human story lurking under the ancient narratives. She cheerfully relates the propaganda of the era, but she is not fooled by it. She knows that virtually every detail she's relating could be false or falsified, but she relates them with a knowing exuberance anyway, since they're all we have....Reading her for page after enormously fun page, we're ashamed at how often we've been lectured into forgetting that history is first and always a story of people. This is a book full of living, savage, thriving, laughing, dying people." (Steve Donoghue )
Los Angeles Times
"Superb...Cleopatra led an epic life, and Schiff captures its sweep and scope in a vigorous narrative aimed at the general reader yet firmly anchored in modern scholarship. The author's greatest strengths remain the lucid intelligence and subtle analysis of personality...Schiff reanimates [Cleopatra] as a living, breathing woman: utterly extraordinary, to be sure, but recognizably human." (Wendy Smith )
Wowowow.com
"The most compelling biography of the year....Miss Schiff can really write....persuasive and entertaining." (Liz Smith)
TIME Magazine
"In Cleopatra: A Life, Stacy Schiff is authoritative and confident...Schiff makes a convincing case against the traditional, male-chauvinist take on Cleopatra as a power-hungry seductress. It's a stance that puts her at odds with 2,000 years' worth of Cleopatra chronicles, and she's aware of it." (Mary Pols )
The New Yorker
"Exceptionally artful...Imaginative attunement with a subject, however, does not have to compromise a vigilant biographer's critical detachment, and Schiff's beautiful writing hums with that tension...ambitious...It is an edifice of speculation and conjecture--like every Cleopatra ever written. But unlike nearly all of them it is a work of literature." (Judith Thurman)
The Daily Beast
"Stacy Schiff has created a masterpiece and firmly cemented a new Cleopatra in our minds--one who had enough sex appeal to sleep with the two most powerful men in the world, Julius Caesar and Mark Antony....eminently readable." (Stephen Sondheim )
"Cleopatra is a fascinating woman and always has been. Stacy Schiff, who is a brilliant writer, has created a book that is so well-written that it's almost like a novel in its juicy literary flair...The city [of Alexandria] is evoked so brilliantly...Wonderful stuff." (Tina Brown )
"With a clear eye, great courage, and formidable erudition, Stacy Schiff has succeeded in removing...many misconceptions...and replacing them with the fascinating portrait of an altogether more substantial woman...Stacy Schiff has managed to create a masterpiece: both a hugely readable portrait of a fascinating, unscrupulous and powerful woman, and a brilliant explanation of the politics that lay behind her actions....she writes with verve, tongue-in-cheek humor, and elegance....she has brought to life Cleopatra." (Michael Korda)
NPR.com
"One of the most highly praised nonfiction books of the autumn. Schiff deftly separates fact from legend, legend from poetry, and creates a model of methodology and compelling story. She re-creates a place and time in a praiseworthy leap from scholarship to narration." (Alan Cheuse, NPR.com,"Best Books of Winter”)
"Schiff rises to the challenge and creates an engaging biography by relentlessly stitching together the pieces of her subject's broader life and making connections between them...reveals through colorful details and clearly written prose." (Ralph Eubanks, NPR.org )
People
“Vivid…Schiff offers and equally colorful history of Egypt, ca. 30 B.C….she reveals a Cleopatra we’ve not yet seen: a fierce, sensuous and complicated queen who ruled in a time and place as fascinating as she was.” (Meredith Maran)
St. Petersburg Times
“For the past 2,000 years or so, history has painted a sexy, scheming veneer on the queen of Egypt known as Cleopatra, so discarding the propaganda is no easy task. But Stacy Schiff’s new biography scrapes away the grime to reveal a smart political strategist, a first-rate military contractor, a proud mother and a witty conversationalist. It’s a startling, invigorating look at a history that has mostly blamed Cleopatra for the fall of great Romans….The most pleasing sense of Schiff’s biography is a fine sense of balance. She reminds us of the particulars of the ancient world we might have forgotten, but she also assumes we have some familiarity with world history and doesn’t get bogged down in the basics…. She is authoritative while open to other interpretations. And she answers fun questions, like what happened to the wives of Julius Caesar and Mark Antony while the men were hanging out with Cleopatra…. Schiff’s restoration reveals a finer portrait of the woman known as Cleopatra.” (Angie Drobnic Holan)
The Seattle Times
“[Schiff] portrays Cleopatra as the ambitious and talented ruler she was and puts her affairs with Caesar and Mark Antony in their proper political context. The Romans, the early writers of Cleopatra’s history, portrayed her as a lascivious power-grabbing hussy. But Schiff works hard and successfully to get beyond the anti-Cleopatra propaganda.” (Mary Ann Gwinn)
Associated Press
“It’s as though Cleopatra lives and breathes once again in the pages of Stacy Schiff’s exquisitely researched and well-written Cleopatra: A Life. The book injects the Egyptian queen with a complexity and humanity that has long since been forgotten….[it] glows with details.” (Lisa Orkin Emmanuel)
USA Today
“Wraps up classical scholarship about the famed Queen of the Nile into an enthralling tale” (Dan Vergano)
"[Cleopatra] sizzles with passion, intrigue... Mixing contemporary sources, beautiful writing and psychological insight, Schiff makes us empathize with the heroine of this tale of togas, territorial conquest and hot love." (Deirdre Donahue, USA Today )
San Francisco Chronicle
“An extraordinary achievement in biography. [Schiff’s] book explores themes of female ambition and power—issues that seem just as vexing now as they did 2,000 years ago….Along with tracing Cleopatra’s rise to power, her loss of Caesar (by assassination) and Mark Antony (to suicide) and the epic story of her empire, this biography is filled with fascinating and amusing details of the era….Lacking any primary sources whatsoever, it is admirable that Schiff could create such a drama-filled and accessible narrative, especially one so rich in detail. It’s true that Cleopatra’s story has long been ‘constructed as much of male fear as fantasy,’ but with Cleopatra, Schiff has produced a compelling and authoritative correction in its place.” (Carmela Ciuraru)
New York Post
Engaging and meticulously researched.” (Susannah Cahalan)
Bookslut
“Schiff impressively recreates the myth of Cleopatra while deconstructing the legend and unveiling its sources -- a handwritten word, a few coins, sparse first-hand testimony, many second-third-fourth hand accounts, and plenty of gossip….Schiff efficiently and entertainingly debunks attempts by historians, poets, politicians, and playwrights (all male) throughout the ages to reduce Cleopatra to a nymphomaniac with a diadem….Stacy Schiff’s eloquent, important book makes it eminently clear that the Cleopatra phenomenon throughout the ages has less to do with the Egyptian queen’s extraordinary accomplishments as a ruler and politician, than to the pervasive and apparently eradicable male fear of powerful women.” (Jenny McPhee)
Library Journal
Pulitzer Prize-winning biographer Schiff (Véra) finally frees us of our two-dimensional understanding of Cleopatra, bringing to life an extremely fascinating woman at once intelligent, ruthless, resourceful, and cunning. She further enhances this vivid portrait with descriptions of life in ancient Egypt and Rome, providing a detailed history that includes many of the important names of the time. Audio is the ideal format to highlight Schiff's monumental research in this massive undertaking; actress/Audie Award nominee Robin Miles's appealing voice works well with the sparkling descriptions. Even the footnotes, so easy to skip when reading, are a pleasure to hear. Biography, Egyptology, and ancient history buffs will be highly rewarded by this fascinating biography. [Includes a bonus PDF of historical documents; the Little, Brown hc was recommended for "undergraduates, lovers of biography or ancient history, and those seeking an introduction to Cleopatra," LJ 9/1/10.—Ed.]—Susan G. Baird, formerly with Oak Lawn P.L., IL
Library Journal - BookSmack!
In her peerless voice-clear, eloquent, and lively-Schiff all but reanimates Cleopatra, bringing forth the person behind the historical myth and the seductive veil of Hollywood. The Cleopatra readers encounter is brutal and cunning, well able to hold her own in the shifting and dangerous political waters that routinely consumed men of great talent and power. Cleopatra is also revealed to be diplomatic and brilliant, focused on building her empire and making her claim. In her biography, Schiff does more than replay the Julius Caesar and Mark Antony interactions (though she does both brilliantly); she brings forward from the pageantry and puffery of a biased history a woman who was far more complex than her few chroniclers would admit or her legend allows. While Schiff has done a masterful job in creating a well-researched (with what little authoritative sources there are) and nuanced portrait of the woman, she has also, as all the best biographers do, illuminated the times and place of Cleopatra. Gold almost drips from the book, and elephants come close to parading off the pages as Schiff describes the lavish court of Cleopatra and the spectacle that was her Alexandria. Neal Wyatt, "RA Crossroads", Booksmack!, 11/4/10
DECEMBER 2010 - AudioFile
This biography of Cleopatra goes well beyond the details of her life, of which little is known beyond what has been passed down from classical writers, painting a picture of life in Egypt at the end of the Hellenistic period. Robin Miles gives an expressive yet understated delivery of Cleopatra’s story—one that is far more complex than the more infamous incidents she is best remembered for. Miles reads the copious footnotes in their proper place in the text, increasing her pace and softening her tone, which clearly delineates the additional information from the main text. Her measured reading, with long pauses that separate ideas, gives listeners time to take in all the details as well as draw their own conclusions about Schiff’s biographical hypotheses. E.N. © AudioFile 2010, Portland, Maine
Kirkus Reviews
A Pulitzer Prize–winning biographer presents a swift, sympathetic life of one of history's most maligned and legendary women.
New Yorker contributor Schiff (A Great Improvisation: Franklin, France, and the Birth of America, 2005, etc.) acknowledges that our image of Cleopatra VII arrives through the distorted lenses of biased (male, Roman) history, romanticized and melodramatic stage productions and films and the distortion of time itself. Cleopatra, a suicide at 39—despite the legend of the asp bite, it was probably poison, writes the author—ruled for 22 years. During that time, she took into her bed some of the most powerful men in history (Julius Caesar, Mark Antony), maneuvered through a male world with intelligence, skill and sanguinary brutality, met and failed to charm Herod and bore children to both Caesar and Antony. Schiff reminds us that Cleopatra and her family were not related to the Egyptian pharaohs but descended from Ptolemy, a Macedonian general with Alexander the Great. She also reminds us that Caesar's Rome was not the Rome of later glories and depravities. The Coliseum did not yet stand, nor did the Pantheon or any number of other Roman architectural marvels. Born in 69 BCE, Cleopatra entered a family for whom the word internecine was surely invented—killing family members standing in the way was routine, and Cleopatra was not above it. The young girl was intellectually quick, savvy and willing to learn, and she soon made her first significant conquest: Caesar. She came to Rome to see him, causing uproar, for Rome was an empire that had a gender test for human rights (women need not apply). Schiff notes that Caesar's assassination was a political disaster for Cleopatra, but she quickly recovered, won Antony and enjoyed a number of amazingly powerful and profligate years before history and the forces of Octavian brought her down.
Successfully dissipating all the perfume, Schiff finds a remarkably complex woman—brutal and loving, dependent and independent, immensely strong but finally vulnerable.
