Actually I'm passing fond of the good doctor, even if he is a bit publicity-crazy. He had the good sense to institute new, stricter controls about foreign expeditions digging here there and everywhere - before, there were poorly-disciplined foreign teams digging up artifacts and spiriting them out of the country.
As for books, I'm afraid my library is very out-of-date in this area. The main work I have on the predynastic period is Michael A Hoffman's "Egypt before the Pharaohs", published in 1979. In fact, I'm waiting for someone who actually knows what they're talking about to come into this thread and disprove everything I've said. :)
I'm not persuaded anyone really knows what they're talking about when it comes to predynastic Egypt :) Our whole concept of Egypt's early history is based on Manetho's record, which comes to us through secondary sources starting with Josephus in the 1st century AD, so that's not a particularly reliable source for events alleged to have taken place c. 3000- BC. Prior to the period covered by Manetho's record we're completely dependent upon archaeological speculations, which are often based on circularly-reasoned correlations with Palestinian and Greek archaeology (on this cf. Amihai Mazar's Archaeology of the Land of the Bible, e.g. p. 29: "Imported pottery and other artifacts from Cyprus and Greece also play a significant role in chronological studies, but sometimes one forgets that absolute dates in these countries are based to a large extent on those in Egypt and the Levant, making the danger of circular argumentation great."), and are prone to being wildly wrong, as the recent collapse of the Bering Strait hypothesis illustrates.
I'd have to agree with you on Rachel Weisz in The Mummy Returns, though :)