More Noted Things

Laura Miller,"Sex and sovereignty in the ancient world," Salon, 31 October, Parul Sehgal for bookforum, 1 November, Michiko Kakutani,"The Woman Who Had the World Enthralled," NYT, 1 November, and Marie Arana for the Washington Post, 2 November, review Stacy Schiff's Cleopatra: A Life.

Bartolomeo Piccolomini,"No Heaven for Suckers," Open Letters Monthly, November, reviews Niccolo Capponi's An Unlikely Prince: the Life and Times of Machiavelli. Hat tip.

Ian Morris,"Western dominance? It's the history of geography," Guardian, 1 November,"explains how Europe's position on the edge of the Atlantic has shaped the west's dominance of recent history, and argues that it is geography which determines the landscape of power."

Steven Shapin,"Cancer World," New Yorker, 8 November, reviews Siddhartha Mukherjee's The Emperor of All Maladies: A Biography of Cancer.

Amanda Foreman reviews Orlando Figes's Crimea: the Last Crusade for the New Statesman, 28 October.

Louis P. Masur,"Take heart, Barack: Honest Abe had a rough midterm too," Salon's War Room, 29 October, sees parallels in midterm elections for Abraham Lincoln and Barack Obama.

Craig Fehrman,"The party of antihistory," Boston Globe, 31 October, lays out Jill Lepore's charges against the Tea Party. Edmund Morris,"The Tea Party Last Time," NYT, 31 October, proves the Times will publish whatever.

Benjamin Schwarz,"The American Critic," Atlantic, November, reviews Library of America's new edition of H. L. Mencken's Prejudices.

Christopher Isherwood,"Revisiting an Outrage With Gallows Humor," NYT, 31 October, reviews the new musical,"The Scottsboro Boys".