The books by the experts in the fields of Astrophysics and Egyptology differ in the fact that Prescod is mad and Cooney is perfectly normal and supremely organized.
Chanda Prescod Weinstein repeats on every page "As a Black woman astrophysicist...". O'K, Sandra, we learnt it from the second page. On every sixth page, she tells that she is Jewish. When she speaks about physics, her thought is lucid and up to the point. But these are rare intermittencies among mad rant about oppression of the Blacks and Native Americans with the extensive references from Woke literary universe. But somehow, in the beginning of the book she repeats--a correct, in my view--mantra that race is a socio-cultural construct. Indeed, if we take skin color as a race marker, it does not conform with genetics. The populations of Sudan are more distant genetically from the populations of Namibia than Norwegians are from Indonesians. If we add territory of ethnic origin, or language, nothing again will make sense. For instance, if the characteristics of a White Race are its European origin and Indo-European languages, the whitest Finns and Estonians, together with Hungarians, not to speak of Jews are excluded. And so on. But if race is an artificial construct of European colonizers, why one has to identify with a particular race at all? Furthermore, her views are Amero-centric. She obviously, does not realize that, historically, class, religion and place of origin played much more significant role than race.
For instance, in the Late Medieval Europe, where the Christianity and ability to form an organized state defined the characteristics of the "Master race", the barbarians were the blond and blue eyed Finns and, especially, Lithuanians, who adopted Christianity only in 1387. It mostly repeated Graeco-Roman classification of German tribes as barbarians for their lack of classic culture and statehood.
Equally strange is the Kara Cooney's discussion of the Egyptian civilization. First, it was the most successful civilization in the world history, ours included, which maintained itself for about 27 centuries with little change. This testifies to the incredible resilience of the structures of its society and powerful centripetal tendencies despite all foreign invasions and conqueror rules. Her criticism was that it was a despotical state based on the cult of deified pharaohs. This is really odd given that a modern democracy is barely older than 200 years and already has developed the signs of senility. Egypt suffered upheavals once in half-millennium, while more "democratic" Roman Empire, for most of its history, had these at least once in twenty years. But this is not the worst part of her altogether interesting book. The worst part are her immature projections of the Egyptian polity on the modern politics (Putin and Trump, in particular--no book should be without them), including women's rights, which she asserts in the epigraph proudly declaring herself being in charge of her family affairs.
[Recently, I re-examined the book of beau Cara. Because I was not sufficiently attentive while reading it the first time, I realized that every passage in the book is peppered with modernizations purporting to prove the connection between autocracy -- a very uncertain term -- and male patriarchy, and white privilege. These diversions make the book more readable, yet they are ahistorical, modernizing -- not in the good sense -- and totally unwarranted. Re-phrasing her argument one can also consider polar exploration, Apollo program and LHC at CERN as monuments to the power preservation and vanity of the Christian male patriarchs.]
