I have seen Shadows in the Desert: Ancient Persia at War cited a fair bit around here and /r/badhistory, and was interested in getting a general history of pre-Islamic Persia. Looking at Amazon reviews, I saw that it talks about the Baghdad Battery, which set my pseudo-history alarms ringing.
So what is the general consensus? A good book? Or if not this, then does anyone have any good recommendations on Ancient Persia?
The Bryn Mawr Classical Review published a scathing review of the book that sums up the weaknesses of the book well.
One of the last lines of Kaveh Farrokh's Shadows in the Desert. Ancient Persia at War is that "there has been an overall decline of programs and studies of Iranica in western Europe and the United States since 1980." If his book were indicative of the quality of modern-day Iranian studies, that decline could only be lauded, because Shadows in the Desert is an exceptionally bad book. Osprey Publishers have obviously invested a lot of energy in producing it, and the book is very attractive indeed, but all their care cannot hide that the manuscript ought to have been returned to its author.
A critical weakness of the work is the author's weak understanding of the primary and secondary sources.
Farrokh is not only uncritical towards the sources, he also has an amazing trust in old secondary literature. He still claims that Alexander the Great was aiming at "unity between Iranians and Greeks" -- that old canard of Droysen (Verschmelzungspolitik), repeated by W.W. Tarn in the 1927 edition of the Cambridge Ancient History, and famously refuted by Badian half a century ago. Another example is the statement that Croesus was defeated in the year 547 (p. 41), which has become untenable since the 1977 edition of Grayson's Assyrian and Babylonian Chronicles.
He also ignores recent scholarship.
I will not digress on the spelling errors (which may be the result of poor editing), topographical mistakes, and logical fallacies, and will concentrate instead on what I think is the main weakness of Shadows in the Desert: it ignores the Iranological Revolution of the 1980s. Today, Achaemenid studies are dominated by one man: the French scholar Pierre Briant. In the 1970s, Iranology was a divided discipline, still in its infancy and -- in Iran -- sponsored by a government that wanted to present Cyrus the Great as an ideal, secular leader. (When Mohammad Reza Shah offered a copy of the Cyrus Cylinder to the United Nations, he added a translation from which all religious references had been left out.) Briant found a discipline in its preparadigmatic stage, and in the 1980s created Iranology's first real paradigm. His magnum opus is the Histoire de l'empire Perse. De Cyrus à Alexandre (1995).
At the same time, Heleen Sancisi-Weerdenburg organized several workshops, the results of which were published in a series of publications called Achaemenid History. For the first time, Achaemenid studies have a clear structure and this is -- even according to more relativistic philosophical theories about the quality of scholarship -- progress. One may regret the sometimes exaggerated admiration for Briant, but his accomplishment is real. Farrokh's statement that "there has been an overall decline of programs and studies of Iranica in western Europe and the United States since 1980" could not be further from the truth.
Instead of referring to the Histoire or Achaemenid History, Farrokh relies upon the internet.
For more scholarly overviews of Persian history and society, try these: