Tag: nonfiction

Day 22: Cleopatra: A Life

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Cover for Cleopatra: A LifeWhen my grandmother traveled to Egypt in the 1960s, she wanted to buy a bust of Cleopatra. She was surprised to find out that the Egyptians consider Cleopatra a traitor. No images of her were available, so Granny Billie came back with a bust of Nefertiti instead.

When you think about Cleopatra, maybe you imagine the beautiful seductress played by Elizabeth Taylor in the movie. Maybe you think about the scheming whore in Antony and Cleopatra. Maybe you even think Cleopatra was Egyptian. (The Ptolemys were Greek.) Stacy Schiff, whose book Cleopatra: A Life was selected by the New York Times for its best books of 2011 list, would point out to you that Cleopatra’s history was written by the victors, her defeaters.

Schiff tells us the engrossing story of what is known of Cleopatra’s true life. Certainly she married her brother. So too did most of the Ptolemaic rulers marry their own siblings. Certainly her brother was executed when he revolted against her. The Ptolemys were noted for lopping off the extra branches of the family tree.

What you may not know is probably more to the point. Schiff shows us a picture of Egypt, the wealthiest country in the ancient world when Cleopatra gained the throne, but already on the wane. And there is its powerful ruler, Cleopatra, not beautiful but cultured and intelligent, reportedly fascinating in conversation, educated. Not the type of woman the patriarchal Romans are used to dealing with.

A clever strategist and negotiator and witness to Rome’s attempt to gobble up the known world, Cleopatra early realized that she needed to carefully pick her allies in Rome’s continuous battles for control of the empire. First she picked Pompey over Julius Caesar—not ultimately the wisest decision, but her family had ties to him, and her brother’s betrayal of him was one of the horror stories of the age. Then she negotiated a partnership with Julius Caesar, but unfortunately he was soon assassinated. Her next choice was not as percipient, but Marc Antony seemed to be the greatest soldier of his time.

There are few unbiased records of Cleopatra’s life, and none that are biased for her, but Schiff does an excellent job of examining the various allegations made in the existing records and judging their likelihood. Rather than the ruthless vixen reviled through the ages, Schiff depicts Cleopatra as a strong woman who was doing her best for her country.

Although some have criticized the book as heavy going (one actually commented that it “lacked dialogue”—I don’t know what source that person thought the dialogue would come from), I didn’t find it so. It was written for the general public but reflects serious scholarship, and Schiff has found an elegant balance between that and entertainment.

Day Seventeen: The Lost City of Z: A Tale of Deadly Obsession in the Amazon

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Cover for The Lost City of ZThe Lost City of Z by David Grann tells the story of a famous British explorer, Percy Fawcett, and his obsession with finding the fabled city of El Dorado in the Amazon. He was the last of the great Victorian adventurers and possibly the inspiration for Indiana Jones (and for the explorer in the movie Up).

Fawcett made a career of exploring the Bolivian and Brazilian Amazon, beginning with being hired by the Bolivian government to establish its border in the Amazon. He became convinced that there had been a large city, which he called Z, in the region of the Xingu River. Hundreds of expeditions had been made to find it, beginning in the 16th century, and many of them were never seen again.

In 1925 Fawcett set off on an expedition funded by the Royal Geographical Society with a small party that included his son and son’s best friend. He sent daily dispatches back from the jungle that were published in the newspapers and waited for with anticipation by the general public. Then the dispatches stopped, and he was never seen again.

But the story wasn’t over. Others went into the jungle to try to find out what happened to him, including a famous movie star. Many of them never returned, either.

Grann, a staff writer for The New Yorker, became interested in the subject, which he came upon while working on another project. During his research, he met with members of the Fawcett family and was given access to a some previously unpublished personal papers. He is able to provide insight into the explorer’s character and thought processes, which makes for a fascinating story.

Grann also became consumed with the fate of the Fawcett expedition and found himself deciding to follow in Fawcett’s footsteps. Although his trip through the Amazon in a jeep was no Victorian expedition, he himself is no explorer. He was surprised to find the Amazon almost as wild today as it was 100 years ago.

And maybe he solved the mystery of what happened to Fawcett’s expedition. The story of Fawcett’s adventures makes compelling reading, and the ending is unexpected.

Day Fourteen: Salt: A World History

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Cover for SaltNo, this review has nothing to do with the Angelina Jolie.

For those of you who aren’t familiar with micro-histories, they are histories about very limited topics. Micro-histories are usually fairly short because of their focus but can be fascinating and go into great detail on a very specialized subject. The best of these that I have read is Zero: The Biography of a Dangerous Idea by Charles Seife, who writes on math and science topics. However, I read that so long ago that I would not be able to write a good review of it.

Today’s review is of Salt: A World History by Mark Kurlansky, who has specialized in writing micro-histories. The book traces what is known about the collection, processing, and uses of salt from the earliest times and the role it plays in history. He quotes commentators from ancient China, Rome, and Egypt on the qualities of salt. He explains how certain cities became prominent in early times because of salt mines or salt fields on bodies of water and how empires (for example, that of Venice) were built around salt, either making it or trading it. He also discusses its close connection with cod and other things important to world history.

The book is a micro-history full of micro-histories. Kurlansky tells about the mines in Poland that have chandeliers carved from salt and explains that the downfall of the French monarchy was a result of the hated salt tax, which placed a heavier burden on the peasants than it did the aristocracy. He explains that one of the reasons for the success of Napolean’s army was the discovery by Nicolas Appert of how to preserve meat by canning (using salt), allowing the army to have a more reliable source of food than simply pillaging the villages. He explains the reasons for Mahatma Ghandi’s illegal march to the sea to gather salt and why it galvanized resistance to British rule in India. He includes recipes.

Basically, if a subject has anything to do with salt, he writes about it. Salt is an interesting book, although it contains many digressions and seems unfocused at times. To pursue a point, he sometimes goes backward and forward in history, which can be confusing. The recipes were interesting at first, as they come from all times in history and from many different countries, but after awhile I felt that they interrupted the flow, especially as some were more than a page long.

I’m told that Kurlansky’s book Cod is even better, and I have that on my shelf waiting to be read, but he said so much about cod in Salt that I’m wondering what more there is to say!

Despite my caveats, if you want to read an engrossing book that will tell you many interesting things you probably didn’t know, read Salt.

Day Nine: Mary Boleyn

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Cover for Mary BoleynIn the introduction to Mary Boleyn, biographer Alison Weir talks about the many misconceptions we have about Anne Boleyn’s less famous sister, which were not only derived from such popular fictions as The Tudors (wildly inaccurate, but I still loved it!) and The Other Boleyn Girl (ditto), but also from biographers and historians over the centuries. Weir calls her book both a biography and a historiography, because she tackles many published statements about Mary’s life and attempts to show the extent of their truth or even likelihood.

Because most of Mary’s life was spent in the background of her glittering, ambitious family, not many actual records or letters that mention her exist, and only a couple of her own letters survive. Even the exact date of her birth is unknown, so that there has been been debate about whether Mary is the older or younger of the two sisters. (Weir makes a good case for older.)

Weir examines Mary’s life from as early as it is known and explores such subjects as whether she had an affair with the King of France (yes, probably a short one), whether she came from that with a ruined reputation, as has been alleged (no, but her family may have sent her away from court), whether she had an affair with Henry VIII (yes, but possibly reluctantly), whether she was then labeled a “famous whore” as has also been alleged (no, hardly anyone knew about it), whether she was married off to an unworthy but complaisant husband as a result (no, she married before the affair to William Carey, a wealthy and influential courtier who was one of Henry VIII’s trusted friends), and so on.

The picture Weir paints is of a woman who has repeatedly been smeared over the centuries. She certainly did not seem to be ambitious, like the rest of her family, because she got very little from her royal lovers. She was almost certainly also not well regarded by her family, probably because she had taken these lovers without gaining an advantage. After her first husband died, she eventually remarried for love, William Stafford, a relatively poor man much lower in status who was 12 years her junior. After she was cut off from her family and court as a result, she described the time of her widowhood as “bondage” and stated in a letter to Thomas Cromwell that no one in the world cared for her except Stafford.

Mary seems to have been slighted by her family for much of her adult life and was finally exiled from them because of her second marriage. This separation may be the only reason she survived her sister and brother.

Weir makes a strong case for Mary’s first child, Katherine Carey, being the unacknowledged daughter of Henry VIII. An appendix relates what happened to Mary’s descendants. Weir remarks that Henry VIII’s line is believed to have died out with Elizabeth I, but assuming she is correct about Katherine’s birth, she provides a fascinating list of some of the famous British people who can trace their lineage back to Mary’s daugher—and so to Henry—including Winston Churchill, Charles Darwin, Lord Nelson, Vita Sackville-West, Ralph Vaughn Williams, Princess Diana, Camilla Parker-Bowles, and Queen Elizabeth II herself.

What, Me Read? Day One

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Cover for The Omnivore's DilemmaHi, there.

I am a voracious reader, sometimes reading several books a week, and I have decided to use this blog to write a book review for every book I read. Maybe no one will be interested in reading this, but maybe it will be fun.

I’m going to start with The Omnivore’s Dilemma by Michael Pollan, journalist and food activist, which I read for my book club.

The book traces back four different types of meals that Pollan ends up preparing and eating, a meal from McDonald’s, one using groceries purchased at a big-box organic grocery store, one using food purchased from a small farmer, and one with food he hunted and gathered himself.

The premise is interesting, and readers familiar with Pollan will know that he goes off on philosophical side trips and provides a lot of vital information about how the American food industry is set up. With one of his other books, In Defense of Food, he did more to make me change my eating habits than anything else I have ever read.

Pollan finds his hunted and gathered meal most satisfying and surprises himself by actually enjoying shooting a wild pig. From a practical standpoint, I was more entranced by the chapters about the small family farm in Virgina, the owner of which was so clever about his use of animals to keep his land and food products healthy.

One of Pollan’s main premises is that food based on corn and soybeans—and you would be surprised how much food IS based on them—is inherently less nutritious and good for you than food based on grass. This is both because of the nutritional value of these foods and the conditions in which corn-based animals are kept versus those who are allowed to graze free.

I was startled by how misleading the labels are, even on our “organic” food. Pollan’s conclusion is that your ability to actually go to the source of your food and see especially how the animals are treated is going to be the only way to ensure that your food is healthy and the animals are humanely treated.

Pollan does some philosophical musing that I sometimes don’t have much patience for, and occasionally I felt like we were getting way off the subject. I noticed that he sometimes didn’t seem to understand how he felt about things without reading what someone else said about them, which I thought was curious.

All in all, though, I think Pollan is one of the most interesting writers about food. I would even more strongly recommend In Defense of Food, where he provides some easy-to-follow shopping rules that allow you to eat more healthily.

Kay