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Cleopatra was queen of a large, rich, highly sophisticated country for more than 20 years, yet almost everything we know about her comes from a legend created by her most deadly enemy, the Roman emperor Augustus.

As author Stacy Schiff points out, it’s as if our only information about Napoleon came from 19th-century British historians: “She effectively ceases to exist without a Roman in the room.” Schiff, the much praised biographer of Vera Nabokov and Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, adeptly evens the score in Cleopatra: A Life by exploring the queen’s Egyptian context and reading the Roman sources with a keen eye for Augustan propaganda.

Schiff’s Cleopatra is not the sexually voracious, treacherous poisoner who seduced Julius Caesar and destroyed Mark Antony. Rather, she is an intelligent, able ruler who did nothing that male kings didn’t do routinely. She tried to protect her own and her country’s interests in the face of Roman aggression. If Antony had been more clever than Augustus, her children with Caesar and Antony would have ruled the East.

Did she seduce Caesar and Antony? Both men were hardened lifelong womanizers. Was Antony too besotted with her to make sound decisions? It seems unlikely; he wrote a letter to Augustus at the height of his alliance with Cleopatra referring to her with ugly vulgarisms. His mistakes were his own.

Schiff persuades us that the queen’s liaisons with both men were mutually beneficial. She got expanded territory, protected by Roman legions, while her lovers got her money. And for Caesar, Antony and Augustus, it was all about Egypt’s wealth, not the color of Cleopatra’s eyes.

Certainly, even a Cleopatra seen with fairness was no George Washington, and Schiff doesn’t ignore her ruthlessness. Cleopatra lived up to her family tradition by having her siblings killed. She also executed her political opponents—and so did Antony and Augustus.

Schiff brings alive not only the personalities but the ambience of the gilded Hellenistic Middle East and still-crude Rome. Her writing beautifully evokes Cleopatra’s stupendous capital Alexandria, “a city of cool raspberry dawns and pearly late afternoons.” Male Roman writers may have hated Cleopatra because she wasn’t the virtuous Roman matron of their own myths, but she was consistently popular with the cultured Alexandrians.

As Schiff concludes, Cleopatra did many things right, but got the main thing wrong: She backed the less talented Roman politician. In the end, Augustus used her captured treasure to make Rome more like Alexandria.
 

Laura Hillenbrand first encountered Louis Zamperini while researching her 2003 bestseller Seabiscuit—and how lucky for us that she did. You may not know his name, but Zamperini was famous in his day, an Olympic runner who was secretly held in Japan for two brutal years during World War II after a plane crash left him stranded at sea, presumed dead. How he survived—and how his family never lost hope for his return—is the epic story at the heart of Unbroken.

Zamperini grew up a mischievous trouble magnet in Southern California. Steered toward competitive running by his brother, he earned a spot on the 1936 U.S. Olympic track team and competed in Berlin. He didn’t medal, but he was on his way to becoming a world-class athlete. Many thought he would be the first man to run a four-minute mile.

Then Germany invaded Poland, and everything changed. Drafted into the Army Air Corps, Zamperini was stationed on Oahu as a bombardier. When his B-24 crashed into the Pacific during a rescue mission, he spent 47 days huddled in a raft, battling sharks and the equatorial sun, before being captured by Japanese forces.

Most Pacific POWs were held with little regard for the protections of the Geneva Convention. Zamperini’s hellish experiences came at the hands of Mutsuhiro Watanabe, a sadistic man who mercilessly and systematically beat, starved and degraded POWs. At his lowest, a battered Zamperini found himself forced to clean a pig pen with his bare hands: “If anything is going to shatter me, Louie thought, this is it. Sickened and starving, his will a fraying wire, Louie had only the faint hope of the war’s end, and rescue, to keep him going.”

Hillenbrand is undoubtedly a terrific reporter and storyteller, with an eye for details that make each page sing. But her truest gift may be her innate respect for her subjects. Hillenbrand never deifies Zamperini, who returned from war a broken man prone to flashbacks and barroom brawls before a chance encounter with evangelist Billy Graham turned his life around. Unbroken is a spellbinding celebration of resilience, forgiveness and the human capacity for finding beauty in the unlikeliest places.