I started the book recently in its new edition, and I like the way it's written. Many informations about many ancient civilizations. I find it a good summary about what was going on not only during the 12th century BC but also many centuries before. It also details many ways of exchanges between those countries/empires. Another interesting point is the way it documents how discoverers found out many tombes, cities, etc... So I wanted to know how is the book considered by historians.
u/UndercoverClassicist blows his cover in this comprehensive response covering the Bronze Age collapse in general and Cline's book.
I'll confess to skimming it (with intent to read later!) but I think some takeaways are that he (Cline) approaches it with the modern understanding that it's not a simple one issue explanation, but also sticks to some outdated thinking like the outsized role of the Sea Peoples in public imagination.
One thing to keep in mind (a point raised in Marc van de Mieroop's History of the Ancient Near East) is that while we call it a collapse, that's biased on the decline of the strong centralized territorial states which were the source of much of our written material from then. The written record doesn't pick up in earnest again until later in the 1st millennium BC, particularly with the rise of Assyria. So sure, things were rough for them, but there's a whole world of people outside the palaces and temples and they experienced a period of innovation with the proliferation of alphabetic scripts and improvements in iron working. And while quite a few cities were destroyed during this time the damage is strangely selective with many also surviving unscathed. Even the famous example of Hattusa (which Ramses' Sea Peoples inscription refers to as being destroyed) seems to have only had selective damage to its administrative and palace buildings which were, interestingly, already abandoned.