America Was Based On A Poetic Vision.

Once We Know Of Atrocities We Cannot Remain Silent, And Knowledge Inevitably Leads To An Urge To Protect The Innocent.

I Could Have Told Him To Learn From Gatsby. From The Lonely, Isolated Gatsby, Who Also Tried To Retrieve His Past And Give Flash And Blood To A Fancy, A Dream That Was Never Meant To Be More Than A Dream.

A Novel Is Not Moral In The Usual Sense Of The Word. It Can Be Called Moral When It Shakes Us Out Of Our Stupor And Makes Us Confront The Absolutes We Believe In.

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.

I Believe That It Is Only Through Empathy, That The Pain Experienced By An Algerian Woman, A North Korean Dissident, A Rwandan Child Or An Iraqi Prisoner, Becomes Real To Me And Not Just Passing News. And It Is At Times Like This When I Ask Myself, Am I Prepared - Like Huck Finn - To Give Up Sunday School Heaven For The Kind Of Hell That Huck Chose?