WTH Should I Read This Summer? "Dinner with King Tut: How Rogue Archeologists are Re-creating the Sights, Sounds, Smells, and Tastes of Lost Civilizations" by Sam Kean

In the next episode of our annual What the Hell’s summer book
series, we are time traveling around the world with experimental
archeologist, Sam Kean, who shares with us his latest science
narrative novel, Dinner with King Tut: How Rogue Archaeologists
Are Re-creating the Sights, Sounds, Smells, and Tastes of Lost
Civilizations (Little Brown and Company, 2025). Sam took us on an
adventure of the senses, back through the history of mankind and
across the globe, from the Egyptian pyramids to the temples of
Mexico. “Above all,” he writes, “I hope this book can reveal what
unites us today with people from long ago, and help us understand
that they were just people, no different than us.” WTH can we
learn from living like those in the past? And WTH do caterpillars
taste like?


Sam Kean is the New York Times-bestselling author of seven books
that combine history and science. His stories have appeared in
The Best American Science and Nature Writing, The New Yorker, The
Atlantic, and Slate, among other places, and his work has been
featured on NPR. His books The Disappearing Spoon and The
Violinist’s Thumb were national bestsellers, and both were named
an Amazon “Top 5” science books of the year.


Find Dinner with King Tut: How Rogue Archaeologists Are
Re-creating the Sights, Sounds, Smells, and Tastes of Lost
Civilizations here.


Find the transcript here.