No one in the modern world controls the wealth or territory that Cleopatra did.

I'm a sucker for lost worlds. I was nostalgic even as a child. I was happiest in my hometown library in Adams, Mass., where nothing seemed to change.

parenting is an exercise in unintended consequences.

Motherhood is always an act of courage.

A rich, multi-dimensional tour of Naples, most brilliant, battered, and bewildering of cities, here fixed to the page with wit and élan. Splendid.

No one sits on the stoop when she's a kid and thinks, 'I want to be a biographer when I grow up,'

When a woman teams up with a snake a moral storm threatens somewhere.