Stacy Schiff — American Author born on October 26, 1961,

Stacy Madeleine Schiff is a Pulitzer Prize-winning American nonfiction author and guest columnist for The New York Times... (wikipedia)

I can't write a line without music - it provides just the right amount of distraction to keep me focused. Clearly, I still miss the noisy roommates.
For the several thousands of years before they became firefighters and physicians, women were sirens, enchantresses, snares. At times it seems as if female powerlessness is male self-preservation in disguise. And for millennia, this has made for a zero-sum game: A woman's intelligence was a man's deception.
You have to scuba dive in the Alexandrian harbor if you want to see what remains of the lighthouse of Cleopatra's day, and the water in the Alexandrian harbor is not really something you want to come into contact with.
No one in the modern world controls the wealth or territory that Cleopatra did.
Here you have an incredibly ambitious, accomplished woman who comes up against some of the same problems that women in power come up against today. Cleopatra plays an oddly pivotal role in world history as well; in her lifetime, Alexandria is the center of the universe, Rome is still a backwater.