Treasures of Tutankhamun

Rating: WORTHY!

This picture book was put out by the Metropolitan Museum of Art which sadly doesn't seem to think the writer(s) deserve recognition, so there is no author. There is writing. Someone wrote it, but MMA says no. We'll credit the photographers, but screw the writers!

That said the book was well-written and beautfully-illustrated. It gives a quite detailed story of how the tomb was discovered (as much by luck as by judgment, and at the eleventh hour, too!), and goes into some detail about many of the treasures. There are color plates and black and white ones, mostly of the original discovery. The tomb had been broken into by thieves well prior to the November 4th, 1922 discovery by Carter's workers, but for some reason, most of its treasures were untouched.

There are literally scores of pictures, and half of this book is a catalogue of the major finds, with images and a nice descriptions accompanying each. See? writing! But despite that sleight to the actual author(s) I commend this as a worthy read.

When Women Ruled the World by Kara Cooney

Rating: WORTHY!

Dr Cooney is a professor of Egyptian Art and Architecture at UCLA and she wrote this non-fiction book about six female kings of Egypt, who ruled in their own right or as the most powerful woman in the land, over various dynasties in Egypt, from the earliest to the last. Their names are: Merneith, Neferusobek, Hatshepsut, Nefertiti, Tausret, and the most infamous: Kleopatra. I was disappointed that all six were not mentioned in the book description, only the ones who are already quite well-known: Hatshepsut, Nefertiti, and Kleopatra (the 7th). it woudl have been nice had they all am mention by name.

I really enjoyed the book, which has a lot of detail, but it should be noted that some of it is speculative and some of it is potentially misleading. While ostensibly promoting female leaders and trying to overturn gender stereotypes, the author indulges in a little bit of her own, which takes away from her message somewhat. That aside, I learned a lot about these six female leaders, even if some of the speculation was hardly mainstream. I was particularly interested in the ones I did not know, and also in Nefertiti, since I had an idea for a novel about her - and that idea has been filled-out rather by the information I gleaned from listening to this audiobook, so it was time well spent for me.

The book goes in chronological order, and while these women weren't the only ones who had power of some sort in ancient Egypt, arguably they were ones who made the most use of it or rose highest through it. I think this is perhaps why the author chose these above any others. The book follows them chronologically and compares and contrasts their rise to power and their achievements while holding it. It goes into a lot of the politics and into why this patriarchal and patrilineal society tolerated and even welcomed a female ruler at critical times, even as it seemingly resented their power in retrospect and tried to erase the name of she who made the contribution. As I said, some of this is speculative and sometimes even sounds rather contradictory, but overall I enjoyed this book and I happily commend it as a worthy read.

Egyptomaniacs by Nicky Nielsen

Rating: WORTHY!

From an advance review copy for which I thank the publisher.

Erratum:
"the tri-factor of ancient Egyptian mysticism and the occult." I think maybe the author meant 'trifecta'? Very strictly-speaking, trifecta isn't the correct term and there are three factors listed before this phrase, but the way the phrase is worded seems to make trifecta a better fit that tri-factor, which is not commonly-used terminiology.

Like many people, no doubt, I've long had an interest in ancient Egypt. I've written a middle-grade humorous novel about a young Cleopatra (Cleoprankster), and there was a section in one of my mature sci-fi novels (Tears in Time) set in ancient Egypt. I also plan on writing at least one more set wholly in ancient Egypt, but trust me when I say I am far from an expert and wouldn't even try to pretend I was. I have read many books on the subject, enjoyed many documentaries, and often enjoy fictional films about it. I was thrilled to be given the chance to view this one and then to review it, and I did not regret it.

I have to say up front that I am always suspicious of authors who put their credentials along with their name on the cover. Often this means they're charlatans, especially if they're talking about new diet regimes! You don't get authors like Neil deGrasse Tyson and Richard Dawkins putting 'Dr' in front of their name or 'PhD' after it, but in this case it's fine because the author, originally from Denmark is, to quote his bio page from the University of Manchester, "...a Lecturer in Egyptology teaching both traditional undergraduate units as well as distance learning. He is also the programme director on the MA Egyptology programme." He did his PhD research at the University of Liverpool investigating subsistence strategies and craft production at the Ramesside fortress site of Zawiyet Umm el-Rakham, obtaining his PhD in 2016. This guy knows what he's talking about!

The book is pithy, with a light tone, but a serious intent. It pulls no punches and suffers no fools, and I love that kind of writing! I especially loved the way he took down the "pyramidology" and "ancient alien visitors" garbage. This kind of scientific fraud and appalling ignorance, which nearly always (but not exclusively) seems to come from the right wing curiously enough, is particularly harmful at times like these when we have a serious and deadly virus literally rampaging across the globe and idiot hucksters standing up and recommending unproven 'miracle drug cures' and 'the injecting of household disinfectants to clean out the virus' - and that's just the president of one country.

But I digress. Egyptian obsession, as the author details, goes back way beyond our current era, and it keeps renewing itself every few years as some new discovery triggers a resurgence of interest. The fact is, again as the author makes clear, that the actual reality of ancient Egypt is fantastical and enthralling enough. Making up fake stories about it, like the ridiculous mummy's curse of Tutankhamen, and inane claims like the one that the pyramids of Gizeh were built to store grain by the Biblical Joseph is not only unnecessary, it's an insulting lie that doesn't even gild the lily.

The author covers these topics from the building of the pyramids and the growth of Egyptian culture and power, right up through modern day. The text is wide-ranging, covering not only scholarly works, but also how this work is viewed in the media and by the entertainment industry. There are eight chapters:

1. The Classical Experience of Ancient Egypt
2. Cabinets of Curiosity
3. Death on the Nile
4. A Tragic Case of the -isms
5. Tutmania and the Media
6. The Mummy, The Mummy, and The Mummy Again
7. Ancient Aliens
8. Who Owns Ancient Egypt?

Not all was plain sailing. This book was only available to a reviewer like me through an ebook, and once again the publisher kow-towed to the monolithic, almost monopolistic power of Amazon, and once again Amazon turned the printed word to Kindling. I flatly refuse to do any sort of business with Amazon. I do not care if it costs me sales. I would rather have peace of mind that I am not supporting the Amazon business model in any way, shape or form.

The text itself wasn't so bad, but unless your work is essentially nothing more than plan vanilla text, Amazon will slice, dice, and julienne it. Amazon hates pretty. It hates organized and neat. It hates drop-caps, for example, and will instead drop your text to the next line. In fact, it will quite randomly put a new line in and drop your text to the next line whether you intended it or not at any point in the book. Some of the text was blood-red for reasons I've never been able to figure out, but I've seen this frequently in Kindle books.

There are photographs included in the back of this book which surprisingly survived the process remarkably well, although I think Amazon ditched at least one of them. I was unaware of the pictures until I finished the book, so I'd already looked-up some of these images online where I could find them. This is mostly tied to the section discussing artistic portrayals of ancient Egypt.

The book had an extensive notes and references section and an index, although none of this was clickable - you can't, for example, go to the note from the text, nor can you return to the text from the note, be warned. Same applies to the index. I'm guessing this book was never intended to be an ebook and was simply dumped into that format for reviewers. It's never a good idea to treat reviewers so cavalierly! It might come back to bite you!

The content list is a mess; it's completely unformatted, with some chapters being clickable (although once you click to a chapter there's no way to click back to the content list, which you may wish to do since the list is so closely printed that you could well tap the wrong chapter and wish to go back and start over. The chapter titles are all on separate lines except for five and six which are jammed together on the same line (Chapter 5 Chapter 6).

Chapter 8 is the only chapter title that is clickable, but it doesn't take you to chapter eight! I never read epilogues and prologues so it wasn't an issue for me that they're not clickable, but the text heading for each chapter wasn't listed with the chapter header ('Chapter 1' and so on)! It was listed separately after all the chapter numbers had been listed - and some of those were clickable! Very confusing. Amazon are idiots. I'm sorry, but they are.

Note that I also checked this out in the Bluefire Reader and Adobe Digital Editions versions, which are far better formatted but much less easy to read on a phone which is where I do most of my reading since I always have it with me. The problem with the PDF version though is that it's an exact copy of how the print version will look and people who know me will also know that I do not approve of the wasted space on these semi-academic print books.

Trees are the only entity on Earth which is actively engaged full time in combating the greenhouse gases causing climate change, so hacking them down to produce books is a thoroughly bad idea, and worse, not respecting the dead trees by leaving acres of white space on every page in a print book is a disgrace in my opinion. Naturally no one wants the entire page to be obliterated with densely-packed text! Readability alone requires some sort of intelligent formatting, but it's still not necessary to have massive margins and extra insert pages identifying part this and part that. Please! Respect the trees before it's too late for all of us.

Those are technical issues though that can be fixed, like, for example, the fact that the book description on Net Galley has the book title wrong! The title on the cover and the title of the page are correct, but the description thinks that the book title is: "Pyramidiots: How We Became Obsessed With Ancient Egypt." I prefer the actual title to that one. As far as the content of the text is concerned though, there's nothing wrong with it. I loved this book and I commend it unreservedly except for the Amazon edition!

Egypt Magnified by David Long

Rating: WORTHY!

This is from an advance review copy for which I thank the publisher.

Technically this is Ancient Egypt Magnified, but I'll let that slide! I have no idea how much work it took to create this picture book for children (and even a few adults, I'll be bound!), but I will testify from my own experience that it had to be a heck of a lot.

The patience involved in this kind of detailed work is stunning. In a small way, it's reminiscent of the Where's Waldo books, but other than a superficial resemblance, it's a very different book. It does involve some spotting of people among a crowd of similar-looking people, but the underlying power of this book is educational, and in that as well as in visual appeal, it runs like an Egyptian Mau (which in case you don't know, is a very sleek and fast domestic cat and a descendent of African wild cats).

Each double-page covers an aspect of ancient life or history in a country which is replete with historical depth. The pages show hundreds of ancient Egyptians living, moving and having their being, involved in all kinds of activities from farming, to pyramid construction, to parades, to mining, and on and on. I don't think there's anything that isn't covered.

Note that this is designed as a print book so even on a tablet computer, the text is very small. You'll need to stretch it to read it, or buy the print version. It's not designed to be an ebook, unless you own one of those television-sized super pad devices, but the ebook is the only version I had access to for this review.

Note also that the author encourages the use of a magnifying glass (hence the title!) to spy-out the 'search' items on each page, which sounds like fun for a young kid. On a tablet, you really don't need one, since you can splay your fingers and enlarge the image, but if your kid isn't up to that, a magnifying glass would work too. The images in the ebook version were a bit blurry when enlarged. I assume that's because the images were low-resololution to keep the file size down, and that the print version will be sharper, but this is only a guess on my part.

Each page contains a couple of short, but information-packed paragraphs about life, as well as a key to ten things or people you can find in the picture, and what those particular things and people represent. There's also a quiz at the end to see if you recall where you saw certain images. On top of that's a primer on hieroglyphics, a glossary of terms, and a timeline of Egyptian history, highlighting the highlights! In short, it's perfect.

I had to do some research on Egyptian ancient history for a section of my novel Tears in Time and also for the more recently released Cleoprankster so I know without even having to look anything up that this author knows what he's talking about.

There are some areas of Egyptian history that are obscure - such as exactly how those huge stones were hauled up those even huger pyramids. I can pretty much promise you it wasn't up a long straight ramp like the one depicted in the fanciful movie 10,000 BC! Such a ramp would require hauling more material than the pyramid itself! Whether it was by an encircling ramp as is depicted here or some other method, such as levering the stones up the stepped outside of the pyramid, or by my personal favorite of maneuvering them up an internal ramp (at least in the later, larger pyramids) is hard to say without further research or discovery.

There's no de-Nile - everything a kid could ever want to know about ancient Egypt is most certainly here for their enjoyment, from ankh to Zoser (okay, Djoser, gimme a break!), and from mummy (which is a bit graphic be warned!) to sun worship, and everything in between. I commend this as a fun and education read for children of all ages.

Tomb of the Golden Bird by Elizabeth Peters

Rating: WARTY!

Set at the time when Howard Carter and Lord Carnarvon discovered the tomb of Tutankhamun, this novel is number 18 in the Amelia Peabody series by Elizabeth Peters aka Barbara Mertz, PhD in Egyptology, but not in writing exciting adventures or thrilling prose. I wasn't aware of this being another in a series I'd already dismissed, since I'd effectively wiped my memory of the previous read!

One of the biggest problems with it was yet another author's inability to grasp that first person voice is worst person voice and should not be used in any novel unless there was a damned good reason for it. Her mistake was revealed here repeatedly by her habit of switching from first person to third person by quoting from some document which was evidently one of the family's other member's record of events. It didn't work and was truly annoying. When will these idiot writers learn to ditch first person altogether unless they can actually justify it and make it work?

This one I stayed with longer than the previous one and found some parts of it interesting and amusing, but ultimately the plot turned out to be as dry as Egyptian sand, and the story went on and on way too long, destroying the warmer feelings I'd harbored for it earlier, and since I found this ultimately to be a tedious read (read; listen!), I shall not be pursuing any more novels by Elizabeth Peters aka Barbara Michaels!

I thought the story might have something to do with the truly amazing discovery of "king Tut's" tomb, but it really didn't. It was to do with some plot to overthrow a government and there were so many red herrings that it stunk of mummified fish, os the thing I was most interested in was merely set decoration. There really was nothing much about the tomb discovery. The rest of the novel was the retarded family rambling on and on about various matters which in part in the beginning was amusing but which became ever more boring the longer the novel went on.

One of the few things which actually made this listenable for me was the reading of Barbara Rosenblatt, who did an amazing job of voice characterization, and of the reading in general. I can see why she's won so many awards for it. Se had equal facility for both male and female voices and did a fine job overall. Sadly, the novel wasn't up to her high standards, and I cannot recommend it!