I must preface this by saying that I haven't read any of Kingsley's other books (and probably won't now).
It is always said that you shouldn't judge a book by it's cover and boy, is that true for A Story Waiting. The reviews on the back cover told me "This is the real thing." "The rich and dense scholarship in this book is admirable, nay incredible, with worldwide scope." "A blazingly alive work of scholarship and spiritual insight."
Okay...so, lets just stop right there: This book is a simply written tale, ignoring a large part of history, written in ambiguous language in which a large proportion of the footnotes lead to the authors own works. That latter piece is enough to have the entire thing disqualified from ever being called a scholarly work. I think Kingsley must have missed that day, in class - or in the initiation into the mysteries, in which it was taught that true scholars do not cite their own work, over and over again, for justification of their theories. There is actually another word for that.
I'm not exactly sure what part of this story was supposed to 'pierce' me. The idea that there was cultural mixing between East and West during the time of Ancient Greece? As much as Kingley acts like this is a new idea, perhaps he should read Joseph Campbell's Masks of God series, first published in 1964. These ideas are not only not new, they are simplistic versions of the truth. Or, perhaps the 'piercing' idea is one in which ancient man believed that he was, or could be, the reincarnation of a sun deity, or any other deity for that matter? Again, read JC. The idea of this has been in the literature for decades as well (see the previously mentioned JC text) and it's no big deal to attribute it to Asia - or, something that is actually piercing, and an idea of Joseph Campbell: to attribute it to the inherent ideas that exist inside of the human psyche, regardless of how a scholar would trace it's path around the earth. Note the ideas in the first chapter of Primitive Mythology....why do newborn chicks run from the symbol of an eagle (a cardboard cutout) being pulled forward across their yard, but they do nothing when it is dragged backwards? Why do all newborn turtles run immediately for the sea, with some inherent sense of that direction, rather than away from it? Why were "cave women" wearing kohl around their eyes as well as other make-up, trying to accentuate some type of symbolic beauty? These things are built into us, somehow, somewhere...maybe there is more to us than merely the physical makeup of our DNA. Now that's actually piercing. THAT'S beautiful. Some ideas, written down in the 21st Century about the influence that Asia had on the Western world? Wakeup dude. Where have you been?