{"id":1032,"date":"2011-04-25T14:43:58","date_gmt":"2011-04-25T19:43:58","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.wilsonld.com\/weblog\/?p=1032"},"modified":"2015-05-31T12:57:05","modified_gmt":"2015-05-31T18:57:05","slug":"cleopatra-a-life","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/wilsonld.com\/weblog\/?p=1032","title":{"rendered":"Cleopatra: A Life"},"content":{"rendered":"

by Stacy Schiff, 2010<\/p>\n

I was very disappointed by this book, the primary reason being the author’s very choppy style.\u00c2\u00a0 I found the style made it extremely hard to read with no flow to the narrative.\u00c2\u00a0 Her style used strange placements of the basic sentence elements (I much prefer subject, verb, object order), a plethora of semi-colons and dashes, odd adverbs (use of “as well” and “too” when “also” would have been more appropriate), and multiple short sentences following each other when proper connectors would have greatly improved the flow.\u00c2\u00a0 There were instances where her usage could have been much simpler and, in some situations, \u00c2\u00a0I found there were\u00c2\u00a0unnecessary added\u00c2\u00a0commas.\u00c2\u00a0 Basically, her writing drove me nuts!<\/p>\n

I also thought that the author frequently introduced new events or characters without the appropriate amount of background information.\u00c2\u00a0 Perhaps a listing of the primary characters at the beginning of the book would have helped here; I noticed that War and Peace<\/em> provided such a list.\u00c2\u00a0 The bottom line is that I didn’t think she did a good job of putting together and telling the story.<\/p>\n

As to the content of the book, it appeared that the author had done a good job of researching her subject and the times.\u00c2\u00a0 Having studied Latin for four years in high schook, I felt that the content of this book put a lot of the times and persons in context.\u00c2\u00a0 If this had not been the case, I would have rated the book even lower.<\/p>\n

Lastly, I think the author could have done a better job of providing some relevance to our current world.\u00c2\u00a0 Other than making sure we understood how amazing a person Cleopatra was, I’m not sure she gave me a lot that I took away from reading this book.\"2<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

by Stacy Schiff, 2010 I was very disappointed by this book, the primary reason being the author’s very choppy style.\u00c2\u00a0 I found the style made it extremely hard to read with no flow to the narrative.\u00c2\u00a0 Her style used strange …<\/span> Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5],"tags":[17,16],"class_list":["post-1032","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-books","tag-biography","tag-non-fiction"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/wilsonld.com\/weblog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1032","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/wilsonld.com\/weblog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/wilsonld.com\/weblog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wilsonld.com\/weblog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wilsonld.com\/weblog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1032"}],"version-history":[{"count":6,"href":"https:\/\/wilsonld.com\/weblog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1032\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1783,"href":"https:\/\/wilsonld.com\/weblog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1032\/revisions\/1783"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/wilsonld.com\/weblog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1032"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wilsonld.com\/weblog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1032"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wilsonld.com\/weblog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1032"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}