Book Review: Who by Fire: Leonard Cohen in the Sinai by Matti Friedman *****

Who by Fire: Leonard Cohen in the Sinai by Matti Friedman
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

When Israel was attacked by a coalition of Arab states on Yom Kippur of 1973, singer-songwriter Leonard Cohen was living in Greece, his personal and professional life at a point of stalemate as he approached the age of 40. Seemingly somewhat to his own surprise, he found himself on a flight to Tel Aviv with the vague idea of volunteering at a kibbutz. What he ended up doing was traveling around the front with other musicians, mostly Israeli, playing for and meeting with the troops. The trip was unpublicized and little specific has been known about it before now, although those who experienced it never forgot it. It also helped revivify Cohen’s creativity and inspired the song “Lover Lover Lover.”

In Who by Fire: Leonard Cohen in the Sinai, journalist Matti Friedman attempts to reconstruct this time through interviews with those who were there as well as a brief unfinished manuscript by Cohen. We vividly relive the events of the war as young men and women, often only in their teens and twenties, grapple with the trauma of invasion and the loss of their comrades, as well as their reaction to those who came to offer a brief respite from those things. Intertwining with reflections on the Yom Kippur service itself, Friedman presents a powerful portrayal of a crucial time in the life of an artist and of a nation.

(Content warning: As is to be expected in a portrayal of war, this book contains some scenes of graphic violence.)


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Book Review: The Fourth Enemy (Daniel Pitt #6) by Anne Perry ****

The Fourth Enemy by Anne Perry
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

At the beginning of his sixth adventure, young lawyer Daniel Pitt’s life has changed in some dramatic ways. Firstly, he and strong-willed forensic scientist Miriam fford Croft, after finally acknowledging their compatibility and strong mutual attraction, have just begun what looks like it will be a very happy marriage, and secondly, Marcus fford Croft, Miriam’s father and Daniel’s boss, has retired from the law firm he founded, hiring the well-reputed but unconventional Gideon Hunter as his replacement.

Almost immediately upon taking over, however, Hunter takes on what could be a make-or-break case for the firm: the prosecution of controversial but also powerful and widely admired newspaper mogul Malcolm Vayne. If Vayne is acquitted, not only will it hurt the firm’s reputation, but he is a man who never forgets a slight and will exercise his considerable influence to do it even more harm. Also, the more they learn about his financial dealings, the clearer it becomes that he is acquiring political power and influence, both at home and abroad, that could endanger the security of the nation. The case eventually escalates to include murder and the placing of Miriam in imminent peril of death before concluding in a dramatic courtroom scene and verdict.

The first half of the book went a bit slowly for my taste, but things quickly picked up once the trial began, and as always, Perry’s characters and the relationships between them are vivid and unforgettable. I particularly liked Gideon Hunter’s wife Rose, who finds a common cause with Miriam in her advocacy of women’s suffrage, and Nadine Parnell, a doughty elderly woman who has done accounting for Vayne for years and is willing to testify against him despite an attempt on her life.

Sadly, Anne Perry passed away right after the publication of The Fourth Enemy, so unless she has left outlines behind and her heirs hire someone to continue the series, this will be the last we hear from Daniel Pitt. I have been reading her books since shortly after the beginning of her first series featuring Charlotte and Thomas Pitt, and will sorely miss her. RIP, Ms. Perry.

I received a copy of The Fourth Enemy from the publisher via NetGalley in exchange for an honest review.

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Book Review: Cleopatra's Daughter: From Roman Prisoner to African Queen by Jane Draycott *****

Cleopatra's Daughter: From Roman Prisoner to African Queen by Jane Draycott
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

I have been waiting for this book ever since I first learned, probably as a teenager, that Cleopatra and Marc Antony had a daughter. Even her name, Cleopatra Selene (after the goddess of the moon), was evocative and intriguing. While it was usually mentioned that she was taken to Rome after her parents’ deaths, along with her two full brothers, who both soon disappear from the historical record, and raised in the household of Octavia, her father’s Roman wife, nothing else was mentioned of her. Finally, Jane Draycott has granted my wish.

With rare exceptions, biographies of ancient and medieval women can be disappointing, mainly due to the sheer paucity of information available about them from a world run by and written about by men, and far too often the book devolves into a “life and times” with a lot about the men in the subject’s life and mainly supposition about the subject herself. I’m happy that this was not the case with Cleopatra’s Daughter. Yes, those things were present, as is to be expected, but I never forgot that she was the focus, and it seemed that Ms. Draycott was able to extract a surprising amount of information from a scanty record. This was helped by the fact that Cleopatra Selene, if not as powerful and charismatic as her mother (a well-nigh impossible task), also seems to have been a formidable woman who inspired loyalty on her own behalf, as well as having what appears to be a compatible and equal match with one of Rome’s client kings.

The book starts with a brief history of the Ptolemaic dynasty, its center in Alexandria, and the lives of the two outsized personalities who would become the parents of Cleopatra Selene. It then traces what her life would have been like, first as a princess and nominally a queen in her own right, as her parents declared her Queen of Crete and Cyrenaica when she was only six years old, then her late childhood and adolescence in Rome, and finally her marriage to Juba II of Numidia, a fellow child hostage who had also been raised in Augustus’s circle, and their rule of the kingdom of Mauretania until what seems to have been a fairly early death. Despite this, she still exerted a large influence on the culture of their court, including Egyptian symbolism in artwork and on their coinage, as well as on Juba’s scholarly writings. Finally, Ms. Draycott speculates on whether the pair, whose son was murdered by Caligula, might also have had one or more daughters whose descendants may have ended up on the imperial throne. I also found her discussion of the fraught question of Cleopatra Selene's mother's, and by extension her own, ethnicity to be both balanced and thoughtful. All in all, I enjoyed this book very much, and it truly brought Cleopatra Selene and those around her to life for me.

I received a copy of Cleopatra’s Daughter from the publisher via NetGalley in exchange for an honest review.

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