Cleopatra: I Am Fire and Air
Written by Harold Bloom
Narrated by Simon Vance
4/5
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About this audiobook
Award-winning writer and beloved professor Harold Bloom writes about Cleopatra with wisdom, joy, exuberance, and compassion. He also explores his own personal relationship to the character: Just as we encounter one Anna Karenina or Jay Gatsby when we are in high school and college and another when we are adults, Bloom explains his shifting understanding of Cleopatra over the course of his own lifetime. The book becomes an extraordinarily moving argument for literature as a path to and a measure of our own humanity.
Bloom is mesmerizing in the classroom, wrestling with the often tragic choices Shakespeare's characters make. With Cleopatra, he delivers exhilarating clarity and invites us to look at this character as a flawed human who might be living in our world. The result is an invaluable resource from our greatest literary critic.
Harold Bloom
Harold Bloom is Sterling Professor of Humanities at Yale University. He has written more than sixty books, including Cleopatra: I Am Fire and Air, Falstaff: Give Me Life, The Western Canon, Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human, and How to Read and Why. He is a MacArthur Prize fellow, a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and the recipient of many awards, including the Academy’s Gold Medal for Criticism. He lives in New Haven, Connecticut.
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Reviews for Cleopatra
10 ratings1 review
- Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5Book received from NetGalley.I enjoyed this literary study about Cleopatra final pharaoh of the Ptolemy dynasty. While Harold Bloom focuses mainly on Shakespeare's play he does bring in a few other fictional accounts of her rule. I also liked how he mentioned the various actresses who portrayed her both on stage and screen. I have to respectfully disagree with his favorite though since I have always been fond of Elizabeth Taylor's portrayal of the royal. I think this would be a great reference for anyone who is currently studying Shakespeare's play.