A legend comes to life

November 21, 2019

He was a realist and a romantic, a lover of strong women and beautiful men. And though he was in his day the richest, most powerful man in the world, his most prized possession was a book – Homer’s “The Iliad,” annotated by his tutor, Aristotle.

Most of all, he was as much a myth as a man and a mystery – even to himself.

When Alexander the Great died in Babylon in 323 B.C. – a month shy of his 33rd birthday – after conquering and reordering Persia, he left a sprawling empire and a burning question: What drove him?

It’s a question I explore in “Daimon: A Novel of Alexander the Great” (Nov. 30, JMS Books), the latest entry in my series “The Games Men Play” and its first historical subject.

Trump’s – and our – ‘Coriolanus’ moment

May 19, 2017

Tragedy, it is said, returns as farce. Richard Nixon’s insecurity and paranoia – his inability to believe he was loved – earned him Watergate, resignation, reinvention and an Oliver Stone treatment of Greek tragedy proportions (“Nixon,” with a very fine Anthony Hopkins in the title role).

One thing is certain: Donald J. Trump won’t be “Stone”d, not for a long time, if at all. We’re still in the farcical “SNL” stage of our relationship with the president. (But then, Nixon, had his caricaturists, too.) ...

Jared Leto and the bridge of the imagination

March 1, 2014

If you were to ask me – a woman who considers herself to be a great connoisseur of beautiful men – who is the most beautiful man I’ve ever seen, I’d have to say Jared Leto. He is it for me (though Johnny Depp is a close second.) I’m not talking beauty plus brains, personality, character or anything else but just sheer physical beauty. It’s no wonder that Oliver Stone cast him as Hephaestion – the love of Alexander the Great’s life – in “Alexander.”

So naturally, I was delighted to see Leto as the frontrunner for the Best Supporting Actor Oscar March 2 for his role as a transgender prostitute in “Dallas Buyers Club.” And just as distressed to see a fatuous Time magazine piece titled “Don’t Applaud Jared Leto’s Transgender ‘Mammy’,” in which Steve Friess likens Leto’s gender portrayal to the racial cliché of Hattie McDaniel’s Mammy in “Gone With The Wind.”

There are so many misguided ideas in this article that it isn’t even funny.