"Her palace shimmered with onyx, garnet, and gold, but was richer still in political and sexual intrigue. Above all else, Cleopatra was a shrewd strategist and an ingenious negotiator. 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....Along the way, Cleopatra's supple personality and the drama of her circumstances have been lost. In a masterly return to the classical sources, Stacy Shiff here boldly separates fact from fiction to rescue the magnetic queen whose death ushered in a new world order." (description from book jacket)
Overall Review: **** (out of five)
Strengths:
- Excellent Scholarship. Shiff not only did extensive primary source research, she takes advantage of her subject matter to explain something of the difficulties of doing primary research, during the ancient period particularly. And though I have a background in history, I believe that she explains it well enough for a non-historian to both understand it and find it interesting. Which beings us to...
- Engaging Writing. Well-researched history doesn't have to be boring, and Shiff's masterful writing proves it. She weaves a compelling narrative of a period of time about which many people don't truly know that much. Popular history often leaves something to be desired in scholarly rigor, and academic history is often depressingly dry. Shiff neatly balances the two, creating a scholarly work that is eminently readable.
- Non-Fiction. Shif's book suffers from all of the drawbacks of non-fiction work, such as lack of dialogue and the sort of fast pace found in fiction. It is also much more scholarly than most popular history, and Shiff deals at length with the methods and practices of historical research. Readers who are simply interested in the story itself may find some of her method discussions to be tedious.
