Ancient Egypt edited by David P. Silverman

This was definitely one of the history book club selections I was sent before I started caring what they sent me. It was an interesting read, covering lightly just about every aspect of life in ancient Egypt. It tried to make the point that even if our perception of the ancient Egyptians is as a people obsessed with death, in fact theirs was a culture founded on the principles of life and rebirth. All that they did for their dead, which went beyond building monuments to maintaining on-going funerary cults, was done based on the belief that the dead lived again after death, just as the sun rose each day after sunset. The specific history was hard to understand, but the cultural aspects were well represented and interesting.