The Roman soldier said to the handmaiden, “Was this well done of your lady?” And she replied, “Extremely well, as befitting the last of so many noble rulers.”
The Queen of Kings
It was a good exit line to be sure even if biographer Stacy Schiff probably would take issue with the “so many noble rulers” part of it. Schiff, who won a 1999 Pulitzer for her book about Vera Nabokov, has written a compulsively readable account of the life and dangerous times of one of the most chronically misunderstood women in history. Cleopatra will be published by Little Brown in November.
Drawing heavily upon the histories of Plutarch and Cassius Dio to reconstruct the bloody and portentous era in which her subject moved, Ms. Schiff is admirably hesitant about presenting legend as fact and she consistently challenges much of what has been assumed about the Egyptian Queen’s character and her motivations. Even the contemporary histories that she relies upon to form the foundation for her biography, she cautions, are somewhat influenced by the politics of their authors. (Cicero emerges from these pages as a sort of B.C. version of Perez Hilton and he paid the price in an era when a sharp tongue could lop off its host’s head.)
Schiff does a fine job in applying human failings, foibles, and virtues to a person too often enshrouded in Hollywood myth and legend. (Oddly enough, Joseph Mankiewicz’ fabled 1963 film adheres very closely to Schiff’s history with the possible, if notable, exception of the rolled rug at the beginning and the asp at the finale.) The descendant of a family of Egyptian rulers that had largely served to demonstrate the limitations of inbreeding, Cleopatra transformed Alexandria into the cultural hub of the world. If Rome remained the center of power, she made certain that much of that power derived from cordial relations with Egypt. She could be wrathful and imperious, but her love for Egypt was maternal and constant.
Through wit and wiles, she managed to survive to the age of 39, an extraordinary feat for any ruler at that period. Ms.
Extremely well done.
Schiff declines to fully embrace the snake as the royal dispatcher. Like everything else she did during the extraordinary life chronicled in this fascinating book, Cleopatra looked very carefully at the various means of loosening the bonds that tied her divine being to the domain of mere mortals. It was a very tentative time to be alive, even for those directly descended from the Gods.
Nineteen hundred years after Cleopatra’s death, while Jack the Ripper remained at large, a man stalked the French countryside who would put both the epic debaucheries of the ancient world and the excesses of the Whitechapel murderer to shame. His eventual capture and conviction would utilize precepts in the young science of forensics. Author Douglas Starr intertwines the lives of a merciless serial killer with the clinical skill and dauntless determination of one the first and most influential proponents of forensics, Dr. Alexandre Lacassagne.
The Killer of Little Shepherds will be published by Knopf in October. Starr tells the horrifying story of Joseph Vacher who, after being discharged from an institution as “sane” after an attempt to kill the recipient of his obsessive affection, embarked on a murderous spree that may have claimed as many as 27 victims. France was fragmented into many provinces that had little interaction and, after committing an atrocity in one, Vacher would simply move on to another.
This is a mesmerizing account of his crimes, his capture, and his trial during which two very different schools of thought concerning the origins of criminal behavior clashed head to head. If it is probably not comfortable reading for the squeamish, Little Shepherds should assume a place of distinction among readers interested in the attainment of a significant milestone in mankind’s endless battle with the blackest elements of his own nature.
{ 0 comments }
