I usually find it quite difficult to get into most non-fiction (spent too many years reading only the fruits of academia), but the author's narrative style in this book was very approachable. In fact, he borders on gossip and speculation at times, but this lack of gravitas offsets the factual basis of Carter's discovery of King Tut's tomb to just the right extent. We feel like we can really get to know Carter's cantankerous and determined personality, which is reall he thread that weaves together the whole narrative. Without Carter (and his adventures) we might be left with nothing more than character sketches of the various people who passed through the Valley of the Kings - ancient or otherwise. ( )

Well, I learned a lot from it, but it was hardly about Tutankhamun's tomb, more about Carter and his relationships with others. Almost half-a-book, could have been meatier. ( )

I checked out this book from the S.F. Public Library after a trip to the anemic Tutankhamun exhibition at the De Young Museum this summer, the former being something quite out of character for me as I normally am a book purchaser rather than a book borrower. Both my fiancée and I were keenly interested in learning more about the Carter expedition in the Valley of the Kings after feeling like we'd both been let down by the museum's lack of background information within the exhibit. As it turns out, our excavation for the greater story will go on, as I would not read this book past the fourth chapter.

It might seem unfair or even inappropriate to post a review of In the Valley of the Kings after perusing only a short section of the book. But the truth is that I simply do not have the time for Daniel Meyerson's writing style. In short, I found it fanciful, meandering, speculative, and self-reverential. Here we have a professor of writing at Columbia attempting to pen a narrative history of Howard Carter and the culture of the archaeology community surrounding him through his life. He does this using mostly primary-source journal entries rather than the longer list of survey and archaeological histories also present in his bibliography. That alone would not be a poor choice, but he insists on painting subjective and liberty-strewn portraits of the major players in this story, which gives it an air of spuriousness. From Meyerson's branding of Gaston Maspero's purview in the Service des Antiquitiés as that of a "dictatorship", to his assessment that period pictures of William Flinders Petrie, the father of modern archaeology, would be more fitting were he to be naked rather than suited, as befits his excavation style. It is these "gliberties" that brand the author as anything but a historian trying to write a popular history book, much more akin to something Dan Brown would call "accurate" than anything else.

Meyerson has trouble clearly conveying a timeline for his slapdash list of events: Howard Carter's horse trips over a stone tomb block in 1898 even though he is narrating from Carter's point-of-view in 1900. In the next sentence, he describes the archaeologist's report from 1901 that describes the fall three years earlier, which then brings us back to 1900, two years after the fall, when he could finally begin excavation on the block over which he had tripped. And in essence, this is all ancillary, because Carter's spill-discovery was virtually empty, and was certainly not the tomb of the famous boy Pharaoh. The end of the chapter then spends two pages foreshadowing the fact that, though this one was not an important find, Carter would eventually find Tut's tomb and go on to fulfill his childhood dreams, etc. The beginning of the next chapter contains nothing about that find whatsoever, only more character-building and creative attribution. I could not tell you what comes after as I have not read that far. One would suspect that the tomb is eventually found, as history has it, but I would not feel confident in letting the author decree it so, at least in his staccato style.

His citations are curious. Instead of numbered endnotes or footnotes, Meyerson has a chapter of Notes in the end section of the book that simply lists a series of journal quotes that he used with a citation from where they were taken. (ex. 19 "a dominant personality" Emma Andrews diary, January 17th 1902.) None of these have corresponding numbers within the chapters themselves, which makes finding them in the text an unnecessary chore. It goes without saying that seeing sentence fragments in any guise from a professor of writing seems odd to this reviewer.

These things could quite honestly be skills unsuited to Meyerson's discipline, so we turn to what we can only suppose is his specialty: the writing craft. But the narrative of Kings is perhaps too effulgent and clever to be easily readable or even cogent. The flowery, bardic prose is spattered with unnecessary parentheticals that seem like either a wink-nudge to his audience or maybe an admission that there really isn't the space here to offer properly parsed background. What should be the delicate use of foreshadowing is boldly hammered throughout the first third of the book, just about ruining "the mystery" altogether. The subject matter doesn't seem to follow a flowing storyline within the division of chapters he has chosen to delineate. Perhaps most markedly, Meyerson allows himself to divert from the telling to meander around the creative images in his head: "Here, in the barren land of the quarries, inscriptions on stone recorded jubilant voices raised in self-praise." This, right in the middle of our introduction to William Petrie. Distracting, to say the least.

I think I get what Daniel Meyerson is trying to do; I think I understand his angle. The professor has done some good research, and though he may not be an expert on the period or the subject matter, he is trying to tantalize his audience using the skills he has and also teach them a little about what was going on in the desert during Carter's tenure there. For this, I give this effort two stars. But the fact remains that some people don't want to slog through a mile of mangrove to learn about alligators. I picked up this book because I thought it would teach me the pertinent background to Howard Carter and the Mystery of King Tutankhamun's Tomb, but really, it only taught me that I enjoy proper history far more than narrative, speculative mythistoire. Moreso, I'm ashamed that I gave up on a book, something that I almost never do. Perhaps I'll try again one day, but not before I read a bit more on the subject from other sources.

Whatever Time, Harper's, and the Washington Post might have positively said about one of his other books, The Linguist and the Emperor, on the back of this one is a lone endorsement written by a colleague of Meyerson's at Columbia. This is all English, all Literature, all Writing. It is not History, and for me, it is not palatable. And it adds fuel to the fire that sometimes flickers between historians and literary-minded academics who dip their feet into history. It can certainly be done, as I have seen and enjoyed many times, but not like this. ( )