What Fresh Take Can There Bernon a ruler who died in 30 B.C. and left behind barely a scrap of her own writing? In Cleopatra: A Life (Little, Brown; 384 pages), Stacy Schiff is as authoritative and confident as a Pulitzer Prize-winning biographer can be, but she's also bracingly honest about the challenge before her. With no new material to work with, she focused on restoring context, peeling away the "hoary propaganda" that surrounded a woman of unmatched ambition who had a habit of ruthlessly killing her own relatives. (As Schiff points out, Cleopatra's male counterparts did the same thing.)
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