Joyce Tyldesley, “Cleopatra: Last Queen of Egypt” (Basic Books, 2008)

Joyce Tyldesley, “Cleopatra: Last Queen of Egypt” (Basic Books, 2008)

“Swords and Sandals” movies always amaze me. You know the ones I’m talking about: “Spartacus,” “Ben-Hur,” “Gladiator,” and the rest. These movies are so rich in detail–both narrative and physical–that you feel like you are “there.” But the fact is that we don’t and really can’t know much about “there” (wherever “there” happens to be in the Ancient World) because the sources are very, very thin. As Joyce Tyldesley points out in her terrific Cleopatra: Last Queen of Egypt (Basic Books, 2008), Cleopatra is a mystery and necessarily so. We don’t know who her mother was, when she was born, what she looked like, whom she married, and a host of other details about her life. That means, of course, that every dramatist from Shakespeare on has been, well, making stuff up about Cleopatra. Actually, many of the “primary sources” about her are full of invention because they were written long after the events they describe by Roman authors who just didn’t like her very much. They did like a good story, so they embellished, as any good storyteller will. Joyce is an excellent storyteller herself, but she takes no poetic license. She tells us just what can be known–and trust me, that’s more than enough to hold our attention! This book is a great read for anyone interested in learning about the real world of Ptolemaic Egypt. Please become a fan of “New Books in History” on Facebook if you haven’t already. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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Meena Khandelwal, "Cookstove Chronicles: Social Life of a Women's Technology in India" (U Arizona Press, 2026)

Meena Khandelwal, "Cookstove Chronicles: Social Life of a Women's Technology in India" (U Arizona Press, 2026)

Stove improvers have been designing and promoting “clean” or “efficient” biomass cookstoves in India since the 1940s and have been frustrated to find their carefully engineered stoves abandoned in ...

8 Juli 1h 1min

Lauren Duval, "The Home Front: Revolutionary Households, Military Occupation, and the Making of American Independence" (UNC Press, 2025)

Lauren Duval, "The Home Front: Revolutionary Households, Military Occupation, and the Making of American Independence" (UNC Press, 2025)

What was it like to live in a city experiencing occupation by a foreign army? What did it mean when a family had to quarter an officer in their home? More specifically, how did military occupation aff...

6 Juli 45min

Rachel Silveri, "The Art of Living in Avant-Garde Paris: Ethics and Self-Making in Dada, Simultanism, and Surrealism" (U Chicago Press, 2026)

Rachel Silveri, "The Art of Living in Avant-Garde Paris: Ethics and Self-Making in Dada, Simultanism, and Surrealism" (U Chicago Press, 2026)

With The Art of Living in Avant-Garde Paris: Ethics and Self-Making in Dada, Simultanism, and Surrealism (University of Chicago Press, 2026), Rachel Silveri takes a fresh look at the desire to unify...

4 Juli 58min

Rosa Campbell, "The Book That Taught the World to Orgasm and Then Disappeared: Shere Hite and the Hite Report" (Melville House, 2026)

Rosa Campbell, "The Book That Taught the World to Orgasm and Then Disappeared: Shere Hite and the Hite Report" (Melville House, 2026)

Despite being one of the leading thinkers of the second wave feminist movement, today Shere Hite is little known, little written about, and, unsurprisingly, little read. Her groundbreaking book, The H...

2 Juli 40min

Nancy Micklewright, "Fashion in Late Ottoman Istanbul: Photography and Identity in a Global City" (Bloomsbury, 2026)

Nancy Micklewright, "Fashion in Late Ottoman Istanbul: Photography and Identity in a Global City" (Bloomsbury, 2026)

Over the 19th century, the women of Istanbul gradually transformed their appearance, adopting European dress and new modes of self-fashioning, including photographs. Fashion in Late Ottoman Istanbul: ...

30 Juni 49min

Chiara Formichi, "Domestic Nationalism: Muslim Women, Health, and Modernity in Indonesia" (Stanford UP, 2025)

Chiara Formichi, "Domestic Nationalism: Muslim Women, Health, and Modernity in Indonesia" (Stanford UP, 2025)

In her most recent publication, Domestic Nationalism: Muslim Women, Health, and Modernity in Indonesia (Stanford UP, 2025), Chiara Formichi argues that Muslim women in Java and Sumatra, from the late ...

30 Juni 1h 12min

Robin Dembroff, "Real Men on Top: How Patriarchy Shapes Our Reality" (Oxford UP, 2026)

Robin Dembroff, "Real Men on Top: How Patriarchy Shapes Our Reality" (Oxford UP, 2026)

In Real Men on Top: How Patriarchy Shapes Our Reality (Oxford University Press, 2026), Robin Dembroff shows us that we don't just live in a patriarchal world. We live in a world that patriarchy taugh...

22 Juni 0s

Stephanie Coontz, "For Better and Worse: The Complicated Past and Challenging Future of Marriage" (Viking, 2026)

Stephanie Coontz, "For Better and Worse: The Complicated Past and Challenging Future of Marriage" (Viking, 2026)

Marriage rates have fallen dramatically since the 1970s. Yet far from devaluing marriage, people still overwhelmingly describe marriage as the highest commitment they can imagine. Most Americans s...

14 Juni 46min

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