Queen Esther's Secrets of Womanhood Book

Good for some laughs, and would probably have been an excellent travelogue if he had left out the attempting to trace the birth of Christ bit. Several chapters in, I'm still unsure how to take this book as a work that purports to be non-fiction. In the introduction, Roberts professes his profound distrust of academics but then he wants us to choke down some wild speculation he dreamed up himself because he spent a year reading at a library and he personally visited some of the sites he thinks probably are the same as the ones Marco Polo was talking about.

Here's a zinger from p. 32 discussing various interpretations of what appears to be an X over P pattern he observes carved into the walls at an ancient ruins. "I've always believed -- and it would not have been lost on Romans -- that the P also stands for St. Paul, whose ideas were superimposed over the X or cross of Jesus." What?

Because I love travel stories involving Iran, I will try to soldier on, but I'm starting to see why his temperamental Iranian guide couldn't help calling him "azzhole" from first meeting.