Great stuff. The stories are pacy, with first-hand accounts from CIA insiders. The anecdotes put you right next to the engineers as they silently drill through a wall to plant a bug, hoping the Soviet official on the other side won't spot anything. A fantastic read.

An intriguing history of ingenious men and women, who could invent a talking tree, an inflatable airplane and an exploding rat.

Tibet, Tibet, so good they named it twice ... French is a writer of generous talents

French has produced something very different from what he calls "Tibetophile" literature, something greatly superior in its honesty and lack of false sentiment

A gripping mix of history, travel writing and personal memoir... vividly told.

An accomplished writer and a keen observer (French) reports his findings vividly... French's reporting is excellent and this is an enjoyable and informative tour of Tibet.

First hand accounts of everyday experiences gleaned from close contact with Tibetan priests, politicians and peasants illuminate this moving book of modern day Tibet.

A gripping account of the events leading up to the battle, the fighting, and the aftermath

Magnificent

Magisterial

Hugely compelling...Schiff sifts through gauzy mythology to uncover a brilliant young woman

[Cleopatra's] first biographers never met her, and she deliberately hid her real self behind vulgar display. A cautious writer would never consider her as a subject. Stacy Schiff, however, has risen to the bait, with deserved confidence ....Schiff's rendering of [Alexandria] is so juicy and cinematic it leaves one with the sense of having visited a hopped-up ancient Las Vegas, with a busy harbor and a really good library....It's dizzying to contemplate the thicket of prejudices, personalities and propaganda Schiff penetrated to reconstruct a woman whose style, ambition and audacity make her a subject worthy of her latest biographer. After all, Stacy Schiff's writing is distinguished by those very same virtues.

Superb...Cleopatra led an epic life, and Schiff captures its sweep and scope in a vigorous narrative aimed at the general reader yet firmly anchored in modern scholarship. The author's greatest strengths remain the lucid intelligence and subtle analysis of personality...Schiff reanimates [Cleopatra] as a living, breathing woman: utterly extraordinary, to be sure, but recognizably human.

Stacy Schiff draws a portrait worthy of her subject's own wit and learning...Ms. Schiff manages to tell Cleopatra's story with a balance of the tragic and the hilarious...[and] does a rare thing: She gives us a book we'd miss if it didn't exist.

Captivating...Ms. Schiff strips away the accretions of myth that have built up around the Egyptian queen and plucks off the imaginative embroiderings of Shakespeare, Shaw and Elizabeth Taylor. In doing so, she gives us a cinematic portrait of a historical figure far more complex and compelling than any fictional creation, and a wide, panning, panoramic picture of her world....Writing with verve and style and wit, Ms. Schiff recreates Cleopatra's lavish courting of Antony (including one dinner in which there was a knee-deep expanse of roses and some of the attendees received not gift baskets but furniture and horses decked out in silver-plated trappings) and his even more extravagant offerings to her (including the library of Pergamum and a host of territories which gave her dominion over Cyprus, portions of Crete and all but two cities of the thriving Phoenician coast). For that matter, Ms. Schiff even manages to make us see afresh famous scenes like Antony's painful death after his defeat at the hands of Octavian, and Cleopatra's subsequent suicide.

A swift, sympathetic life of one of history's most maligned and legendary women.