It’s a very attractive book, with a shiny cover and a sturdy binding and lots of visuals.  I also like that vocabulary words are bolded and defined in the margins, right on the page where they are found.  Unfortunately, I found the text a bit surface-level, with a lot of generalities, and sometimes statements that even seemed contradictory: in the introduction it starts out by telling us how stable the Egyptian government was for 3000 years, and then in the first chapter it goes on to list a litany of wars and changes of dynasties, interspersed with periods of chaos and civil unrest; on page 68 it tells us, “Royalty, the wealthy, and children were the only people with leisure time,” but a few pages later it states that, “Board games were a popular way for both the poor and the wealthy to enjoy family time.”  More than once the book tells us that for a long time experts in Egyptology believed one thing, but that now they believe something else, but the reader is never told what the evidence was that altered long-held understandings. Also, the “timeline” in the back of the book simply lists a series of dates horizontally, evenly spaced, even though some of the time periods cover 2000 years, and others only 300 years — there’s nothing in the spacing to provide a visual representation of the time involved.