Bests & Worsts Reviews from Amazon

I love a good bio as much as anyone and after reading the glowing encomiums about this book, I picked up a copy. My bad. Slogging through this bio is like a 300-mile trek through wet sand. Page after page after page of essentially nothing. We learn a lot about the history of the Ptolemies, first century Alexandria, but next to nothing about the woman whose life this book purports to be about. Another problem for this reviewer is Schiff's writing style, which may work for Vanity Fair or a gossip tabloid but falls flat when writing a serious biography. She also sees fit, for some odd reason, to bring up and excoriate Elizabeth Taylor several times for playing Cleopatra in the movie. What this has to do with Cleopatra's life, this reviewer is at a loss to imagine. One wonders, while reading the book, if Schiff was trying to write a biography, a historical novel, or a Vanity Fair essay, and couldn't make up her mind either way. Taken any way you want, the book is boring and derivative. Even the cover picture threw me off; I kept thinking where had I seen that picture before until it hit me: danged if that pose wasn't a dead ringer for the cover photo of Andrew Morton's recent "unauthorized" biography of Angelina Jolie. Is Schiff trying to give us an intimation of what's to come? Rumor on the street is that Schiff has been paid a bajillion smackers for the film rights to this book to have Jolie playing the title role. If this really is the case (and I'm betting it isn't), a remake of the movie with Jolie playing the title role couldn't help but be an improvement over this book -- unless they have Brad Pitt playing Mark Antony. "Mr. and Mrs. Smith in Alexandria" would be one sequel too many. Judy Lind