Bests & Worsts Reviews from Amazon

As I have recently been interested in understanding the ancient world and how it was transformed into the modern, I thought a book like this might be good for providing a general overview of that epoch. For awhile it seemed to fit the bill, although I did notice the author seemed to have a tendency to make large assumptions and generally default to a sort of conservative/easy version of history. For example I have the impression the dating of the pyramids is considerably more complicated than she makes out. Then I got to the Hebrews in Egypt. With growing amazement I began to realize I was being treated to the story of Moses, lifted right out of the Bible, as though that were some sort of HISTORICAL document. The author actually refers to "God" as having "made a deal" with Abraham and his descendants and then sending the ten plagues as "divine reprisal." That's right, "God" actually appears as a CHARACTER in this work of "history." Not only that, the author then goes on to take this opportunity to burnish the credentials of this "God" by telling us why "he" is better than anything in Egyptian spirituality - YES, she actually goes into "my God is better" territory - and contemptuously dismisses the notion that this exalted concept of "God" could have had anything to do with ancient astrotheological religions by blustering, "He is so far beyond the disk of the sun that it could not begin to represent Him." After having recovered from the considerable shock of seeing a supposed "historian" go to considerable length to throw her own credentials out the window, I radically revised my estimate of this book. Since my entire axis of interest lies in the transformation of the ancient "pagan" world with all its religious variety into the stranglehold of a single state-run religion under the Romans, I would obviously not be wise to trust this author with her gargantuan biases, and I would suggest that anyone actually interested in HISTORY find some other introduction to the ancient world.