Cleopatra's Nose: 39 Varieties of Desire Book

A New York Times Notable Book of 2007

Cleopatra's Nose is an exuberant gathering of essays and profiles, representing twenty years of Judith Thurman's writing, particularly her fascination with human vanity, femininity, and "women's work"—a term that, in her definition, encompasses haute couture, literature, and ruling empires. The subjects are varied—Cleopatra, Jackie Kennedy, Anne Frank; tofu, performance art, pornography—but as a whole these essays hint at the central preoccupations of a uniquely inquisitive mind.

The Barnes & Noble Review

"Men and women suffer from grandiosity in different ways. Men tend toward fantasies of omnipotence, women of uniqueness," Judith Thurman posited in a 2002 essay on Catherine Millet. This latter claim -- that womanhood is somehow allied with the pursuit of singularity -- lies at the center of Thurman's new essay collection, Cleopatra's Nose: 39 Varieties of Desire, an insightful composite of two decades worth of her writings for The New Yorker. Impressive in their range yet grounded in a common sensibility, the essays of Cleopatra's Nose, taken together, represent a cultural history of extravagance at the turn of the millennium, from its fashion icons (Balenciaga, Armani) to its fads (artisanal tofu, exercise bulimia). The collection occasionally loses sight of its overarching conceit, proving stronger when it remains in the world of couture than when it ventures into literary criticism, but these conceptual detours rarely detract from Thurman's authority as an arbiter of culture. She has a knack for describing textures -- those of both fabrics and lives -- in a way that captures the longing, and indeed the variousness, of our collective desires.
--Amelia Atlas