From the Publisher
MENZIES [IS] PROPOUNDING ONE OF THE MOST REVOLUTIONARY IDEAS IN THE HISTORY OF HISTORY.” — New York Times Magazine
“A DISTINGUISHED HISTORIAN.” — BBC World Service
“A HISTORICAL DETECTIVE, AS WELL AS A SCHOLAR, [WHO] ADDS TO OUR KNOWLEDGE OF THE WORLD, PAST AND PRESENT.” — New York Daily News
“ASTOUNDING . . . MENZIES SHOULD GET THE NOBEL AND PULITZER PRIZES FOR HIS WORK. WALK ALONG THE PATHWAYS OF DISCOVERY WITH HIM. IT IS A JOYOUS JAUNT.” — San Bernadino Sun
“I WANT TO CONGRATULATE GAVIN MENZIES ON A REMARKABLE JOB OF RESEARCH … A CONVINCING CASE FOR THE ORIGIN OF THE ATLANTIS MYTH … I RECOMMEND THE LOST EMPIRE OF ATLANTIS.” — Betty Meggers, Director of the Latin American Archaeology Program at the Smithsonian Institution's National Museum of Natural History
San Bernadino Sun
ASTOUNDING . . . MENZIES SHOULD GET THE NOBEL AND PULITZER PRIZES FOR HIS WORK. WALK ALONG THE PATHWAYS OF DISCOVERY WITH HIM. IT IS A JOYOUS JAUNT.
Betty Meggers
I WANT TO CONGRATULATE GAVIN MENZIES ON A REMARKABLE JOB OF RESEARCH … A CONVINCING CASE FOR THE ORIGIN OF THE ATLANTIS MYTH … I RECOMMEND THE LOST EMPIRE OF ATLANTIS.
New York Daily News
A HISTORICAL DETECTIVE, AS WELL AS A SCHOLAR, [WHO] ADDS TO OUR KNOWLEDGE OF THE WORLD, PAST AND PRESENT.
BBC World Service
A DISTINGUISHED HISTORIAN.
New York Times Magazine
MENZIES [IS] PROPOUNDING ONE OF THE MOST REVOLUTIONARY IDEAS IN THE HISTORY OF HISTORY.
New York Daily News
A HISTORICAL DETECTIVE, AS WELL AS A SCHOLAR, [WHO] ADDS TO OUR KNOWLEDGE OF THE WORLD, PAST AND PRESENT.
Library Journal
In his latest speculative work, Menzies (1421: The Year China Discovered America) takes on the much celebrated topic of the fabled Atlantis. Through several generally entertaining chapters, Menzies—who served many years in Britain's Royal Navy—points out the numerous bits of evidence that culminate in his belief that the Minoan people of Crete and Thíra were technologically advanced enough during pre-Hellenic times to travel to western Europe and beyond. He contends that these deft seafarers established trading posts in places ranging from the British Isles to the Great Lakes region of North America. As in his previous works, Menzies does not employ the historical method and insists that his revisionist history is accurate. He is a gifted storyteller and displays in his work the passion of a believer. In spite of this, it must be remembered that history and archaeology are disciplines ruled by solid evidence rather than by unprovable statements. VERDICT If you are in need of a good yarn in the vein of an Indiana Jones film, this is the book for you; however, if you do not care for mostly fictional works cloaked in the mantle of verity, avoid it. [See Prepub Alert, 3/14/11.]—Brian Renvall, Mesalands Community Coll., Tucumcari, NM
Kirkus Reviews
The author of 1434 (2008) and 1421 (2003) argues that the destruction of Atlantis was not fiction but a tale of an actual volcano and consequent tsunami that devastated the heart of the vast Minoan empire on Crete and Santorini (then called Thera). Employing the research of many scholars, the self-confidence of a rock star, the zeal of a True Believer and a travel budget sufficient to make Marco Polo and Henry Stanley glow an envious green, Menzies, who served in the Royal Navy, begins his tale on Crete, where he and his wife went for a brief vacation. When he saw the ruins of the palace of Phaestos, his curiosity about the Minoans was piqued, and off he went, chasing down Minoan artifacts, viewing ruins, interviewing scholars and visiting sites of significance, from Crete to England (did you know that Stonehenge was Minoan?) to Lake Superior to the Mississippi River (which the Minoans used to access their American mines) to, well, just about everywhere. Menzies claims that 2,000 years before Christ, the Minoans ruled a vast Bronze Age empire with myriad outposts. They were master shipbuilders, sailors, mathematicians, astronomers and navigators, and they gathered tin from England and copper from mines around Lake Superior, from which they crafted the bronze tools found later in many relevant sites. If Menzies is right--a massive IF that scholars will surely address--then the tsunami of 1500 BCE might have been the wave that drowned a culture, occasioned Plato's story and spawned a giant Atlantis-related industry. The author's style is breathless and excessively spiced with rhetorical questions, but--thank Zeus--he invokes no ancient astronauts. Animated by a contagious enthusiasm that will propel eager, like-minded readers into a truly Lost World.
