We All Had To Pay, But Not

Thus The Regime Has Deprived Iranian Women Not Just Of Their Present Rights, But Also Of Their History And Their Past.

I See People Who Talk About America, And Then Undermine It By Not Paying Attention To Its Soul, To Its Poetry. I See Polarization, Reductionism And Superficiality.

The Novels Were An Escape From Reality In The Sense That We Could Marvel At Their Beauty And Perfection. Curiously, The Novels We Escaped Into Led Us Finally To Question And Prod Our Own Realities, About Which We Felt So Helplessly Speechless.

What Dazzles Us In Stacy Schiff's Cleopatra Are Not The Alluring Mythologies About The Evasive Queen, But The Astonishing If Rare Historical Facts That Schiff Has Meticulously And Lovingly Excavated. Schiff Offers Not Just Cleopatra's Story But The Story Of An Amazing Era, One That Has Vanished But Still Affects Us, Questioning The Way We Look At Myth, History, And Ourselves.

We Speak Of Facts, Yet Facts Exist Only Partially To Us If They Are Not Repeated And Re-created Through Emotions, Thoughts And Feelings. To Me It Seemed As If We Had Not Really Existed, Or Only Half Existed, Because We Could Not Imaginatively Realize Ourselves And Communicate To The World, Because We Had Used Works Of Imagination To Serve As Handmaidens To Some Political Ploy.