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Rating: 
Summary: I Say FIVE Stars for The Linguist
Review: Daniel Meyerson (the great author of this book) has done it again! I read his first book (The Deception of Something About Mary) and had to purchase and read this book. I am delighted that I did! His education has brought this so-so story to life.As a young boy Jean-Francois Jossua Champollion became absolutely obsessed with very old languages. He assembled a 2,387 word dicktionary of Copticy that is Egyptian in origin. He cracked the code of hieroglyphics. He was the first to understand the meaning behind mummification and why organs were removed and put into simple clay pottery. The black and white photos are subperb in there detail. Included is a picture of Jean-Francois Jossua Champollion as a young boy at the exact moment that he cracked the code. You should see the smile on him face. I highly recommend that you buy this book today, and if not today then tomorrow before Amazon runs out! This book will be in the top five of the New York best sellers.
Rating:
Summary: I Say FIVE Stars for The Linguist
Review: Daniel Meyerson (the great author of this book) has done it again! I read his first book (The Deception of Something About Mary) and had to purchase and read this book. I am delighted that I did! His education has brought this so-so story to life. As a young boy Jean-Francois Jossua Champollion became absolutely obsessed with very old languages. He assembled a 2,387 word dicktionary of Copticy that is Egyptian in origin. He cracked the code of hieroglyphics. He was the first to understand the meaning behind mummification and why organs were removed and put into simple clay pottery. The black and white photos are subperb in there detail. Included is a picture of Jean-Francois Jossua Champollion as a young boy at the exact moment that he cracked the code. You should see the smile on him face. I highly recommend that you buy this book today, and if not today then tomorrow before Amazon runs out! This book will be in the top five of the New York best sellers.
Rating: 
Summary: Artistically rendered account on decoding Egyptian writing
Review: Daniel Meyerson's story of the Rosetta Stone - its discovery by Napoleon's soldiers and its intrepretation by Champollion - tells the story with the broad strokes of a painter using mixed styles. Broadly giving the background of the time and then recounting in some detail certain characters related to the story, some very much peripheral to the story. If you like your history told like an adventure novel, then this book is for you. In some points the story may confuse because sections of the book alternate between Napoleon's story, Champollion's and other historical persons and not necessarily in chronological order (and there is no subject index). Part I ends with Champollion's declaration, when still a schoolboy, that he will decipher the hieroglyphs of Egypt. Part 2 gives background on Egyptian history, Alexander the Great, the Ptolemys, Napoleon's time in Egypt and the various ways Egyptian antiquities were brought to Europe. The key of the cartouches, and specifically, the name Ptolemy, and the realization that some hieroglyphs are homophones (different symbols for the same sound) as well as 'determinatives" come to light near the end of the book. For a certainty, someone would have eventually figured out the hierogylphs. The book emphasizes Champollion's extensive studies of ancient languages and especially that of Coptic being instrumental in his being able to crack the code.
Rating:
Summary: First half gets 2 stars the last half gets 4
Review: I had to read this book in front of a computer so I could look up the extensive vocabulary and the the works of art the author references. I'm glad I did. I found the beginning of the book to be a tad drawn out and dry, as the author begins to build the foundation for Champollion's and Napoleon's efforts. The second half of the book I found to be very enjoyable but most likely because of my more than average interest in languages. Even so, I liked the book and recomend it to history enthusiasts, egyptologists, Napoleon wanna-be's, people who like to collect sophisticated books, as an excellent gift for the Eurodite in the family, and friends and family of Daniel Meyerson
Rating:
Summary: Entertaining but sparse...
Review: I was hoping for more; but what I was given was a romantic account of Napoleon's conquest and a 'cheer for the underdog' telling of Champollion's obsession with the ancient languages. Would I recommend the book? For the budding Egyptologist I would - but if it's answers you're after, try Cheik Anta Diop's Civilization or Barbarism or, and I'm sure they're out there and I'm sure I'll be reading them, a multitude of more descriptive and scientific works about the decipherment of the heiroglyphs. In fact, a glossary at the back of this book cites a large number of advanced readings - maybe I should give it a second look.
Rating: 
Summary: Needs More Linguist, Less Emperor
Review: I'm sure it's just me, but this book didn't have enough to say about Champollion. I was looking forward to a detailed narrative describing Champollion's quest to decipher the Rosetta stone. My expectations were not met. Instead, I got a few chapters about how Champollion was interested in Coptic alternating between chapters about Napoleon's conquest of Egypt, and some other stuff (I won't ruin it for you if you do read the book). True, the basics were there, but I suppose the stuff I was looking for would be a little dry for a mass-market book. I'm the kind of guy that buys grammars and introductions to languages that seem interesting. This book did not sate my desire to know more about Champollion. Also, one review mentions black & white photos in the book. The copy I recieved had no such photos, which was a huge disappointment. Enough has been written about Napoleon. Not much has been written about Champollion. He deserves his own modern biography. I'm still looking for it.
Rating:
Summary: Croc wrestling and incest on the Nile
Review: No story about ancient Egypt would be complete without some mention of the embalming process used to make mummies, so details of that process, such as removing the brains through the nose or the maintenance of the mummy's embalmed (...) separate from his body (apparently it is reattached in the afterworld) are expected. Some mention of incestuous relationships, especially between royal siblings of the Ptolemy dynasty, is to be expected as well. However, M seems to have attempted to catalog every manner of sexual perversion imaginable in this work of 'meticulous history', such as fetishism (Egyptian priest executed for abusing himself with queen's hair), prison sex, necrophilia (apparently no beautiful woman's corpse was safe in ancient Egypt), rape of captured French soldiers by Bedouin nomads, catamites, costume play (Napoleon dressed as maid, Pharaoh Snefru dressed his harem in nothing but fishnet), cliterectomy, brother-sister incest, mother/sister-daughter/niece-brother/uncle incestuous ménage à trois, bestiality, temple prostitutes, etc. M's tabloid-like coverage continues in sordid detail, such as listing Josephine's lovers (aside from Napoleon): her first husband, an unnamed prisoner, the dandy Hippolyte Charles; and Napoleon's lovers (aside from Josephine): an 18-year-old Austrian archduchess, Mme George, the Polish beauty Countess Walewska, several unnamed Egyptian women, several unnamed Abyssinian slave women, the French lieutenant's wife, Pauline Fourès. It is hard to see what bearing much of this has on the story at hand, other than to titillate the reader. But don't run out and buy it expecting anything hardcore: there is little detail and M can't even bring himself to say (...). Instead M uses prudish euphemisms such as member or phallus. This really cannot be called linguistics, history, or erotica-it's just gossip. No taboo is untouched, no matter how detached from the dramatic events which are supposedly the actual topics of the story: cannibalism, a pharaoh feeding his children to dogs, a Roman feeding slave boys to lamprey eels, French soldiers wrestling crocodiles on the Nile, Napoleon having sick prostitutes sewn in sacks and thrown in the Nile, Frederick the Great reassigns a man convicted of bestiality with a horse to a cavalry unit, Marie Antoinette squatting to "pee" in her favorite plum-colored shoes before she is guillotined. Well, all this might have made for amusing comic relief had there been deep, meaningful discussion of Champollion's linguistic exploits, which, I believe, is the primary reason anyone would purchase this book. However, the discussion of the actual deciphering of the hieroglyphs is much sketchier than I had hoped for. The brief discussion does provide a succinct outline of Champollion's breakthrough, which started with the deciphering of the readings of proper names, which were set off from the rest of a text by a cartouche, such as Ptolemy, Cleopatra, Alexander the Great, Berenice, Ramesses, etc, and was followed by the discovery that particles and other frequently occurring words were similar in sound to Coptic or were similar in orthographic form to special characters derived from the hieroglyphs and used in written Coptic, a Greek script, to represent sounds not found in Greek. This was enough to disprove previous mistaken assumptions about ancient Egyptian based on Horapollo's Hieroglyphica and establish Champollion as the scholar who finally deciphered the Hieroglyphs. This book makes for an amusing read, but too much space is taken up with Meyerson's erudite bric-a-brac which might better have been spent on Egyptology and details of the story of how Champollion deciphered of the hieroglyphs.
Rating:
Summary: Keys of Egypt
Review: What a shame this is disappointing. For anyone wanting a good, well-written modern biography of Champollion, with lots of background on hieroglyphs, they should go for The Keys of Egypt by Lesley & Roy Adkins.
Rating:
Summary: Keys of Egypt
Review: What a shame this is disappointing. For anyone wanting a good, well-written modern biography of Champollion, with lots of background on hieroglyphs, they should go for The Keys of Egypt by Lesley & Roy Adkins.
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