Bests & Worsts Reviews from Amazon

This is a great history book, but as a time traveler who was stranded for 35 years in an alternate ancient-egypt timeline before my friends rescued me, there were a lot of gaps in this book. I traveled back to before the apocalpyse (good luck y'all!) to leave this review. Useful plants were mentioned and discussed without a description of what they look like. Combat in ancient egypt was basically stabbing people with pointy bits of metal. I was eventually able to teach them how to make crossbows and siege weaponry, but that was from memory, not this book. The book helped identify penicillin mold, but not how to grow large quantities of it. We had to do lots of trials with different setups to get a good production system going. It's nice to know coffee and corn are available for cultivation if I can bring them back from the new world, but I wasn't able to take advantage of that in my timeline. A lot of concepts are mentioned, but without the diagrams or step-by-step guides on how to build that tech, you're stuck doing lots of experimentation. I feel like a section on medicinal plants & microbiology might have been helpful. We were close to developing a working microscope before I was rescued. I was hoping for something a bit more practical, like the 'back to basics handbook', but this book does give you a broad overview of major concepts up to the invention of electricity & radio. My advice to you if you're stuck in the past is: quickly establish yourself as a wizard, using whatever tech you brought with you. Heck, the ancient egyptians were impressed with my sunglasses alone. Demand the brightest teens be sent to you, and then delegate, delegate, delegate. Set some to work on developing 4-field crop rotation (an easy one), and then work up the tech tree as rapidly as you can.