As promised I am taking a break from dead white European males to write about an author who is 1) living, 2)a woman and 3) Doesn't even write fiction,. but there is nothing in the MFA bylaws that says I have to confine my attentions exclusively to fiction and so we are going to take a little journey back in time, before there was a Europe, really. But there was an empire, and rivalries and one of the most effective rulers of her time, and she was a woman, the kind who could make Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan sit up and take notice, and who was so great and larger than life, that the current Republican leadership would have to stand on each others shoulders, just so they could kiss her ass. I refer of course to Cleopatra the VII, Otherwise known simply as Cleopatra. Sometimes real history is really just as dramatic as in the movies.
And who do we have to thank for this? Why Stacy Schiff, that's who, a writer of masterful biographies, whose biography of Antoine Saint-Exupery was a pulitzer prize finalist and in every way superb, and who has won a pulitzer for her biography of Mrs Vladimir Nabokov and many other well-deserved awards. She is also This Weeks favorite author of mine.
Let us now descend below the Great Orange Glyph and revisit Ptolomaic Egypt, Rome just before it became an Empire, and the world of a civilization so great it would arguably never be surpassed until the 18th century.