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    Cleopatra the Great: The Woman Behind the Legend
    Unavailable
    Cleopatra the Great: The Woman Behind the Legend
    Unavailable
    Cleopatra the Great: The Woman Behind the Legend
    Ebook661 pages14 hours

    Cleopatra the Great: The Woman Behind the Legend

    By Dr. Joann Fletcher

    3.5/5

    ()

    Currently unavailable

    Currently unavailable

    About this ebook

    World-Renowned Egyptologist Dr. Joann Fletcher offers an unparalleled look at one of history’s most fascinating leaders—Politician, Mother, and Goddess—the legendary Cleopatra.

    The subject of myth for more than two millennia, Cleopatra was a woman of passion, magnetism, and political genius, the last and greatest Egyptian pharaoh. In this mesmerizing biography, Egyptologist Joann Fletcher draws on a wealth of newly discovered information and research to reveal this vital woman as she truly was, from her first meeting with Julius Caesar to her legendary death by snakebite.

    Cleopatra the Great tells the story of a turbulent time and the extraordinary woman at its center. A polymath monarch, she was also a potent combination of traditionalist and innovator, astute enough to realize what was necessary for Egypt’s continued prosperity and sufficiently ruthless to allow nothing to stand in her way.

    Yet our understanding of Cleopatra has been obscured by Roman propaganda, Shakespearean tragedy, and Hollywood glamour. Cleopatra the Great pieces together the pharaoh’s ancient world with details about her massive library and infamous banquets, her relationships with both Julius Caesar and Mark Antony, and her skillful use of fashion and style to further her ambitions and her mystique. Intelligent and compulsively readable, here is an unparalleled biography worthy of its subject.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherHarperCollins
    Release dateMay 17, 2011
    ISBN9780062106056
    Unavailable
    Cleopatra the Great: The Woman Behind the Legend
    Author

    Dr. Joann Fletcher

    Dr. Joann Fletcher is an honorary research and teaching fellow at the University of York, where she teaches Egyptian funerary archaeology and mummification. The author of numerous articles and books, she also lectures widely. She lives in Yorkshire, England.

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    Reviews for Cleopatra the Great

    3.5/5

    14 ratings3 reviews

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    • 3/5
      The writing was a bit rough at times - with too much reliance on "no doubt" and other phrases that ironically show doubt - I felt like a got a fairly good picture of Cleopatra from this biography. The writing also spends WAY too much space describing feasts.
    • 3/5
      It seemed like a couple of bios on Cleopatra came out around the same time and I had never thought much about reading one even as much as I like biographies. I ran across an article that talked about her and it got my interest so I picked out this particular book. The article that mentioned she was probably a polymath and this prompted me in wanting to know more about her.The book was OK and certainly covered the specifics surrounding the historical events but not as much about her personality and persona, as much as I was looking for in any event. This could be that not as much is known about her as we might like. I obviously had much to learn because I thought she was Egyptian and I found she was really more of Macedonian origin. No question she was certainly highly intelligent and capable, in a world where lives of even the powerful could be snuffed out in an instant. Egypt comes across to me as an advanced society for this time as women like Cleopatra could rise to positions of power and respect, something that took many centuries for our own culture to come to grips with.I found it interesting that the author pointed out her much fabled death by asp was probably myth like much in history and religious origin. Her speculation was that Cleopatra was fairly advanced on poisons and chemistry of the time to know what and how to apply want she needed to escape nefarious plans of Octavian. Not a snake bite that fits in more conveniently with the romance of legend,
    • 2/5
      I started reading this and then was struck by a sense of familiarity. I checked and found that, sure enough, I've partly read another book by Fletcher. Widely criticised for her sensational claims about Nefertiti, and to my mind horribly self-aggrandising -- if I pick up a book about Nefertiti, I want to learn about her, not about Joann Fletcher. And I find it somewhat suspicious that Fletcher supports theories that most other accounts dismiss as unlikely or even ridiculous, and that her wild claims actually caused her to be banned from Egypt. My impression has been that Joann Fletcher is far more interested in Joann Fletcher than in Nefertiti, or Cleopatra, or even Egypt as a whole.

      This might be unfair, but I found Fletcher presumptuous in what I read of this book. I don't know how anyone can claim to know Cleopatra's thoughts and feelings so exactly based on archaeology and research, and Fletcher's introduction emphasising the relative dearth of Cleopatra research gave me a sinking feeling too -- I'm sure she said as much in The Search for Nefertiti, too.

      Not gonna risk more time with this. I have another biography of Cleopatra to read, and countless other things. i do think, though, that Fletcher would definitely be convincing enough in style and tone to write a novel about Cleopatra...