2nd read:
I picked this up again, because I was looking to do research for my next book… mostly just looking for inspiration. I downloaded the e-book version so that I could highlight relevant portions, and then listened via audio to the portions that didn’t seem as important for my purposes. This time, I loved it!
Relevant for me were the beginning and the end primarily, with respect to the potential deep prehistory of Antarctica. Hancock made a compelling case that it was, essentially, the site of the lost island of Atlantis (though he never used that term that I can recall… but I do remember when I was researching how Plato described Atlantis while writing “The Atlantis Bloodline,” the way Antarctica was described on the ancient maps sounds eerily accurate.) He then jumped to South America, and then spent a chunk of the book on Egypt, which was a repeat of the previous book I’d read by him that was entirely about Egyptology… there, he was making the point that a race of demigods had apparently visited the ancient peoples of our known civilizations, and left behind “fingerprints” in the form of unparalleled architecture with astrological purposes. Then he brought it home to the idea that this advanced civilization of demigods had actually come from Antarctica.
I disagreed with some of his fundamental worldview that shaped some elements of his conclusions, but for purposes of fictional research, none of that mattered. It was a fascinating and very helpful read.
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The concept started out fascinating, and I was especially intrigued by implications that there was once a very advanced civilization around 5000 years ago (which would fit with the biblical flood story quite well, though the author clearly had no intention whatsoever of implying this). But I was listening to it rather than reading, and I wasn’t doing research for any particular project at the time, so I found that I just wasn’t interested enough to listen to a whole book about it. I read a Graham Hancock book on Egyptology when I was writing “Invincible”, and his alternative ideas were extremely useful for that, though, so I suspect I may revisit this in the future if I’m ever working on another project that requires conspiracy theories of ancient civilizations.
My rating: *****
Language: none
Sexual content: none
Violence: none
Political content: mild (and I’m sure he didn’t realize it was there)
