A review by robinwalter
The Writing of the Gods: The Race to Decode the Rosetta Stone by Edward Dolnick

informative medium-paced

4.25

This book would have scored 4.5 or 4.75 if only it had cut to the chase sooner. It was longer than it needed to be to cover the advertised theme because the author got bogged down in the beginning providing a plethora of largely superfluous details about Napoleon's Egyptian campaign. Had the book started with "Napoleon's force discovered the Rosetta Stone" and carried on from there, it would have been an absolute ripper.

 Once it DID get to the chase, the book soared. The wealth of information was fascinating, the analogies and comparison helpful and often amusing, as in this favourite explaining how we subconsciously use context to aid  in processing spoken speech:
 

Primed by thoughts of tangerine trees and marmalade skies, we hear a girl with kaleidoscope eyes and not a girl with colitis goes by

Extra marks for the clear-eyed candour about the gap between the mythologised splendor of Ancient Egypt and its much more brutal and humdrum reality. The abundance of caveats throughout the book were welcome signs of the author's intent to present "just the facts", and that he did so in an informative and and at times entertaining manner is to his credit.