I believe that it is only through empathy, that the pain experienced by an Algerian woman, a North Korean dissident, a Rwandan child or an Iraqi prisoner, becomes real to me and not just passing news. And it is at times like this when I ask myself, am I prepared - like Huck Finn - to give up Sunday school heaven for the kind of hell that Huck chose?

What dazzles us in Stacy Schiff's Cleopatra are not the alluring mythologies about the evasive queen, but the astonishing if rare historical facts that Schiff has meticulously and lovingly excavated. Schiff offers not just Cleopatra's story but the story of an amazing era, one that has vanished but still affects us, questioning the way we look at myth, history, and ourselves.

Thus the regime has deprived Iranian women not just of their present rights, but also of their history and their past.

Reality has become so intolerable, she said, so bleak, that all I can paint now are the colors of my dreams.

Unfortunately for governments like that of Iran, when they forbid something, people become more interested.

I'm a perfectly equipped failure.

The negative side of the American Dream comes when people pursue success at any cost, which in turn destroys the vision and the dream.