The author writes in a conversational, rarely pedantic style, freely quoting authors such as Joann Fletcher and Stacy...
Not so much a biography of the queen as a basic history of the rise of Rome.
Crime writer and historian Trow (Ripper Hunter: Abberline and the Whitechapel Murders, 2012, etc.) admits that the sources for learning about Cleopatra are few; there are no letters, not even a bit of gossip. The Egyptians were fantastic record keepers, but only for the purpose of knowing their wealth and the tax rolls. The story begins with Alexander the Great clearing the Persians out of Egypt, but the narrative focuses more on his general, Ptolemy, who stole his corpse and founded Alexandria and the 300-year dynasty that ended with Cleopatra. Ptolemy’s Egyptian kingdom was rich and Alexander’s library already world-famous while Romans were still living in mud huts on the Tiber. Cleopatra lived in a civilization where women owned property in their own right, were educated alongside their brothers and ran their own businesses. The expansion of the Roman Empire through the feats of Julius Caesar (as extolled by himself) proves to be a marked contrast to the playboy image that Trow paints of Mark Antony. The two men Cleopatra cleverly persuaded to protect her empire both forfeited their lives for her.
The author writes in a conversational, rarely pedantic style, freely quoting authors such as Joann Fletcher and Stacy Schiff, and the book is a painless primer leading up to the Angelina Jolie/Brad Pitt Cleopatra film.Pub Date: April 1, 2013
ISBN: 978-0-7624-4801-2
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Running Press
Review Posted Online: Jan. 28, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2013
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular...
A neurosurgeon with a passion for literature tragically finds his perfect subject after his diagnosis of terminal lung cancer.
Writing isn’t brain surgery, but it’s rare when someone adept at the latter is also so accomplished at the former. Searching for meaning and purpose in his life, Kalanithi pursued a doctorate in literature and had felt certain that he wouldn’t enter the field of medicine, in which his father and other members of his family excelled. “But I couldn’t let go of the question,” he writes, after realizing that his goals “didn’t quite fit in an English department.” “Where did biology, morality, literature and philosophy intersect?” So he decided to set aside his doctoral dissertation and belatedly prepare for medical school, which “would allow me a chance to find answers that are not in books, to find a different sort of sublime, to forge relationships with the suffering, and to keep following the question of what makes human life meaningful, even in the face of death and decay.” The author’s empathy undoubtedly made him an exceptional doctor, and the precision of his prose—as well as the moral purpose underscoring it—suggests that he could have written a good book on any subject he chose. Part of what makes this book so essential is the fact that it was written under a death sentence following the diagnosis that upended his life, just as he was preparing to end his residency and attract offers at the top of his profession. Kalanithi learned he might have 10 years to live or perhaps five. Should he return to neurosurgery (he could and did), or should he write (he also did)? Should he and his wife have a baby? They did, eight months before he died, which was less than two years after the original diagnosis. “The fact of death is unsettling,” he understates. “Yet there is no other way to live.”
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular clarity.Pub Date: Jan. 19, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-8129-8840-6
Page Count: 248
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: Sept. 29, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2015
PERSPECTIVES
The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...
Elie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children.
He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions.
Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2006
ISBN: 0374500010
Page Count: 120
Publisher: Hill & Wang
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006
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