Nonfiction: The Woman Who Would be King, Kara Cooney

Hey look!  I read grownup books too!

The Woman Who Would be King: Hatshepsut's Rise to Power in Ancient Egypt
Kara Cooney
ISBN: 978030795767
Finished October 23, 2014

This one has taken a while to read - usually I'm faster than this, but then usually I'm reading light "pop" nonfiction, or reading on topics I'm already pretty familiar with (education, neurological science) and this was way outside my area of familiarity.  I started it about two weeks ago, and have been slowly working my way through, and now it's over and I wish there was more!

I loved it.  I know enough about archaeology to know that most of the "suppose" thises and "perhaps" those other things and "maybe" this or thats are way unusual for the field (and I think actually frowned on) but for a historical figure like Hatshepsut, where there's really no chance of us really learning about how her life really was, I don't see the harm, and I agree with the author that there's really no other way to write about her without it being a dry-as-dust textbook listing of the artifacts found and their significance and implications.

Now, I do wish that there had been room to write a few "alternate history" accounts, especially in sections that had to be total conjecture like working relationships and palace life, or in places where there are competing and roughly equal interpretations of how events took place (for example: after her death, when we deal with the destruction of her monuments and the obliteration of the mentions of her daughter and head official).

I learned so much, and now I want to know so much more.  I've not read the footnotes or the references yet, but I'm planning on it (they're impressively long) and I hope that some of my questions will be answered there.  Regardless, I'm sensing a resurgence of my elementary school passion for Egyptology.

Here's hoping that Cooney writes another one!