I can't write a proper review without writing a full fledged essay about academic integrity and white male tourism into other cultures. 

To make a long story short, this book is just another addition to a long history of white men exoticizing and orientalizing other cultures and flippantly coursing through academic fields then captializing off of it. What this "new version" is really is self-made collage of others translations *of different poems* (across languages and hundreds of years mind you)with random lines of complete PERSONAL ADDITIONS (???). The stars I gave were for the notes at the end referencing what versions Mitchell plucked from and when he fabricated his own lines (not that there is any reflection of these notes within the text itself, of course 🙄) and the openness in the introduction and "about the translation" for noting how little the author has anything to do with an academic practice remotely related to ancient babylon and assyria. It takes balls to, after 60+ pages of summarizing and analyzing your own "version" of an ancient southwest-asian epic through an almost exclusively european lens (often excluding the history of mesopotamian cultures post 1100 BCE and the name of multiple modern day countries), admit that you have no background in the field of which you write, no knowledge of the original languages of the poetry you have shaped to your own preference, and are relying entirely on others lifetimes of academic efforts for a book you charge $20 for. And somehow Stephen Mitchell has these balls.