Customer Reviews

The Atlantis Revelation

5 star:		(10)
4 star:		(12)
3 star:		(23)
2 star:		(7)
1 star:		(9)

 

 

I've always been interested in anything to do with Atlantis and this was the third book of a set so I figured it should be a good read. It opens with an action scene in the Mediterranean ocean. A guy dives on a sunken German WWII sub that's 300 feet down. He's on a tether with a air hose diving to 300 feet. He finds the skeleton of the captain, intact, gets attacked by 3 other divers and one of them cuts his air hose. Then he blacks out for awhile, with no air. Wakes up, gets grabbed by the skeleton, grabs the skull like a bowling ball and "breaks it off the skeleton" and uses it to smash the bony hand holding his leg. He sees a brick of C-4 with a timer counting down from 2:45, 2:44, 2:43,,, The sub starts to slide off a ledge into the 3 mile deep abyss as he stays at the same depth the sub drops down from around him. He swims off to the side as the sub explodes and then he rides the blast to the serface, from 300 feet deep and no air for at least 3 minutes, (more like ten or fifteen minutes from the time his air hose was cut and the sub blows up) When he gets to the serface his boat is gone and several dead Bottle Nose Dolphins that were cooked in the explosion are floating around him but he's fine.
Now of course its filled out a bit in the book but do you see how many things are wrong with it? Free dives to 300 feet are very dangerous. You need air/gas mixture and decompress on the way back up. It cant be done on a tether and air hose. There wouldn't be any skeletons or bones left on the sub after over 60 years, intact or other wise. A couple dozen Dolphins get cooked in the same blast that takes the guy back to the serface, from 300 feet deep, with no air. He also was shot through the leg with a spear gun and reached down with one hand and broke the barbed end off that was sticking out of his leg then stabbed the guy that shot him in the stomach with it. All after his air hose was cut. This is all in the first chapter. I hate it when a author thinks that I'm stupid.
Its obvious that the author doesn't know anything about diving. He wrote an extensive opening scene and didn't even research something as simple as diving information to get it right. From there it goes to the bottom of the ocean under the North Pole. I'm not sure but I don't think that I can finish this book. The author needed to research better the things that he writes about. If the rest of it is as wildly inaccurate as the opening chapters I'm not going to be able to stand it. It reminds me of the movie Armageddon. It was a big hit because of all the computer animation and explosions and people ignored that 99% of what they did was flat out impossible.

I only made it through the first two chapters of this so-called "Thriller". It's a unsatisfying version of the now standard "Saving the World from the Bad Guys" genre adventure with semi-religious and/or supernatural overtones. The plot line is unbelieveable, the dialog is sophomoric and the characters are cardboard-like. What I find truly amazing is how the publisher convinced other well known real thriller authors to agree to quotes of praise that appear on the rear flap and back cover. The only good news here is that I didn't also waste my money on the earlier two books in this series.

How is the narration related to the topic of Atlantis? The linkage is rather thin but the book is marginally readable and it does seem to meet the requirements for a 'Conrad saves the world and gets the girl' type action thriller. Significant chunks of the plot could be traced back to sources such as the Indiana Jones series, The DaVinci Code, National Treasure, the current celeb, conspiracy and political Internet chatter and maybe the Wikipedia and a few Google tools.

Briefly discussing the plot - because we don't want to spoil the fun - distinguished scholar, incredibly sexy, near-indestructible, hyperactive man of the world and man of action Conrad Yeats mingles with today's 'masters of the Universe', shoots a few of them dead, gets himself beat, shot, electrocuted, drowned and... bedded, stops, humiliates, hurts or delays the bad guys every time he's offered the opportunity and it's all in good fun and for the good of the unsuspecting and generally indifferent world. The reason for Atlantis in the title seems to be this installment being part of a series of Atlantis-related thrillers and the aptly-named 'Flammenschwert' being allegedly related to some ancient technology that could be traced back to the old Atlantis civilization. That's just about all I will say because the near-300 pages could be gobbled up in one or 2 reading sessions so, those who can't wait to find out what the book was about can reach the end quickly and for the most parts painlessly.

Concerning the style... it's an action thing. No one should expect any deep introspective discussions or the characters ever slowing down or stopping to think much about what they are doing before jumping in or out of cars, boats or planes, shooting or blowing up each other or jumping in and out of bed with each other. It's all fast action and, it seems, the author found an interesting way of doing away with long and artsy descriptions of people, circumstances or locales. And why bother in our rapidly globalized and standardized world with long-winded paragraphs when all required is a few well-known international brand names and logos thrown into the narration and we can all picture it for ourselves. Why bother with complex narrations when simply stating that X was waiting for Y 'by a silver Mercedes-Benz G55 AMG sport-utility vehicle" would do as well - we can easily picture it in our mind or, if we are not familiar with the brand or model, we can Google it and get all the specs in a second. And stating that 'the plane was a propeller-driven DHC-3, powered by a single six hundred-horsepower Pratt & Whitney Wasp radial and fitted with floats' should be enough when telling the reader that the young, sexy and pilot-experienced nun was about to board a sea plane. The characters who don't bother with BlackBerries are stuck with $100,000 Vertu phones except for a couple of minor characters relegated to Nokias. The tycoons and potentates tend to have real names: Sarkozy and Carla Bruni, Bill Gates, Madonna and we all know who they are and what they are about. The sites tend to be well known or at least easily Googleable: Gstaadt, Corfu, the Vatican, the Temple Mound and except for one or two brief incidents there is no mud or sweating and no one ever tires or slows down. Many of the events have recently occurred in 'real life' and simply making reference to them removes the need to burden the reader with any elaborate explanation of what exactly is going on - to the extent that the reader watches the cable 'news' channels and is familiar with some of the conspiracy theories that are well and abundantly documented on the Net.

The narration is so simplified and reduced to global standards, all that's left is a lot of room for the action characters to constantly and frantically chase each other, bump into each other and shoot at each other and fast-travel on, over or around an area comprising mostly the Southern Europe plus Switzerland and Jerusalem. This, usually, unwinding with dozen of world 'dignitaries' and various well-known castles, palaces or well-known tourist attractions as the backdrops.

I do not want to leave the wrong impression. As far as brand names, locations and today's news and events, the book is very well researched. The author correctly states that a Tweet can only be 140 characters long and 'Glacier 3000' is correctly placed in Gstaadt. Sarkozy is indeed married to Clara Bruni, the foreign minister of Israel is or was recently named 'Tzipi' and Bill Gates is known to be attending the Bilderberg conferences. The book abounds in street names, restaurants, boutiques, hotels, palaces and castles that can be looked up and found to actually exist and, should The Atlantis Revelation turn into the kind of blockbuster the DaVinci Code became, it would be possible to organize book-inspired tours covering most of the sites mentioned where the participants could actually wear, drive, fly, drink, eat and, under controlled circumstances, maybe even shoot the brands mentioned in the story but that's not likely to happen. The over-abundance of brand names is annoying, the actual celebrities 'speaking' in the book can seem spooky and clichéd and the motives behind all that plotting and killing are not convincing. Unlike the DaVinci Code where the action and the interactions support, explain and attempt to validate some lofty idea, in The Atlantis Revelation the 'ideas' - the mysteries and the conspiracies - seem to be there as a pretext for more bloody clashes and more spectacular explosions.

I commend the author for the thorough research but there should be more to good literature than well-researched facts, even in a self-described thriller. The book gets 3 stars (mildly positive) mainly for the effort. A little more work on character and plot development could make the next installment a genuine first-class thriller.

I titled my review 'Flammenschwert' because 'Flammenschwert' is probably the most frequently used proper noun in this narration and there's a lot of them. Probably closely followed by 'BlackBerry'.

When this book was listed as part of the Vine review program I did a little bit of research. I had noticed that Greanias had other books with the word Atlantis in the title. I didn't want to start off with a book in the middle of the series. No mention anywhere that this was a continuation of a series. I looked closely at the title and the front cover. No mention of "The continuing adventures of..." or "Next in the..." anywhere. The blurb on the back actually makes it sound as if there is a fully contained story within the covers. One clue, and a misleading one at that, is at the top of the back cover. It is pushed that this is a NEW INTERNATIONAL THRILLER from the author of....

What the heck, I'll give it a try.

What a mistake!

Within just a few pages of the beginning, characters that obviously have a lot of background are encountering each other and referring to previous encounters and adventures. One of the female characters slaps Conrad Yeats the second she sees him and starts talking about how he abandoned her the last time they were together. This is EXACTLY what I was trying to avoid!! Who is this woman and what did Conrad do? I DUNNO!! It is never revealed!!!

OK, I put the fact that this was the next book in the series on the back burner and moved on. Oh, if it were only that easy! By page 100 I have encountered several organizations and at least 5 characters that have had significant impact in previous stories and there is NO exposition to bring the reader up to speed.

It dawned on me that this really isn't its own book as it is so cleverly disguised. This is merely a few more chapters of a much longer storyline masquerading as its own book. Conrad Yeats, our intrepid hero, is apparently an Archaeologist as well as being a cheap rip off of James Bond. He is the master of disguises with resources the reader didn't know about because THEY AREN'T TOLD!!!

Any more would just be a rant. Suffice it to say, this book is just a little part of a bigger story. There is a lot of back-story that is not revealed to the reader and they are forced to play catch-up. Ultimately, it is not worth the reader's time to do so and the value of this "book" drops to zero.

If you have the motivation to do so, go back and start with the other two books before getting to this one. I am amazed a publisher would actually put this pile of pressed cellulose on the market.

A 2009 fictional thriller by the New York Times best selling author of "The Atlantis Prophesy" and "Raising Atlantis," I found myself hooked from the very beginning. The book is very well written. It grabbed my attention immediately and held it through until the end. The story begins with our hero, archaeologist stud-muffin Conrad Yeats, and a Greek crew on a fishing boat. They are in search of a relic from the lost continent of Atlantis on a Nazi submarine sunken 3 miles into the depths of the Mediterranean. Yeats unexpectedly finds more than he bargains for when he finds the Flammenschwert and is soon confronted and attacked by Sir Roman Midaslovich "Midas," a Russian so filthy rich he can give his girlfriend, Mercedes LeRoche, a million dollar bracelet as a trinket.

We soon meet the beautiful and intelligent Serena Serghetti, a Vatican linguist, who is head of the Dominus Dei, and a former love of Professor Yeats, although they never quite got it on.

The Alignment is an international organization said to be Atlantean decendents who will stop at nothing, even global Armageddon, to establish a new world order. Power groups like the infamous Bilderbergers are woven into the power struggle. Professor Yeats' father was a Bilderberger, so he is known in the circle.

Interwoven historical information provides a welcome familiarity for mind assimilation. Mention of the Freemasons, Knights Templar, Stonehenge, the Kabala and other names you have likely read about add to the familiarity. Thriller, action, espionage, good guys vs. bad guys, blow-up-the-world kinda stuff, assassins around every corner, you are never quite sure which side someone is on. People are hunted and sometimes killed all over the globe, cover-ups are everwhere. Something like a James Bond type story, the characters span the globe from Washington, DC, to Gstaad, Switzerland, Rome, Paris, and London, and many other places.

(Note that if the diving survival was B.S., I wouldn't recognize it anyway so it didn't matter. I read for the enjoyment of reading, not to analyze the story for flaws. Heck, James Bond is B.S. too, but I still love the stories.)

I thought this book was excellent! It was pretty much non-stop adventure. It was similar to James Bond and Angels & Demons storyline. It held me captive so much so that I woke up on Columbus Day at 4 a.m. (a day off for me) and was compelled to read the last 47 pages! (I don't normally do that.) I tried to go back to sleep but the mind said, "I'll have none of that!--Gotta finish." I loved it and would certainly highly recommend it.

Ah, it's the sort of story you're sure you've heard before - a sunken Nazi submarine that was returning from Antarctica, where it had picked up some ancient Atlantean technology that could be used to destroy...well, perhaps not the entire world, but a good chunk of it. And now its precious cargo has been seized by a Russian Mafiosi who's a tool of the rising New World Order. Various secret organizations are jockeying to see whether this situation will further their plans of world domination, or hinder them. See, it's a story as old as time.

OK, I am being facetious, but I just could not take this story seriously. Please do not take the comparisons between this story and the famous James Bond stories seriously. Those stories at least tried to keep their feet grounded somewhere in reality, whereas this story takes off for the heights of fantasy and never looks back. It's just too outrageously silly for me, and kept me continuously rolling my eyes.

I once read a reviewer talking about a movie, and his punch line was that to watch the movie you needed to suspend reality until it was "dead, dead, dead." And that pretty much sums up my feelings about this book. It's fantastical to the point of silliness, and I definitely do NOT recommend it.

You've heard the adage "fool me once, shame on you; fool me twice, shame on me"? Well, shame on me for being taken in the second time by author Greanias and his `Atlantis' series. Despite my hopes that maybe he was getting better, this latest book is even worse than his earlier books.

So what's the problem with "The Atlantis Revelation"?

1.) It has little to do with Atlantis - while Conrad Yates is back from the previous books, and his odd DNA confirmation (supposedly an indication of Atlantian roots) is mentioned in passing, the plot of this book has little to do with nor does it further the Atlantis story line of the earlier books in the series.

2.) Many thrillers are guilty of having leading characters who survive scrapes and situations that would kill most hapless mortals, but the survival at least has to be plausible, even if not likely. Greanias doesn't let a little thing like plausibility bother him. First chapter: Deep sea diving, Conrad sets out to find a sunken German submarine. Shortly after he finds it, however, so do the bad guys. After they shot a harpoon dart into his leg, Conrad manages to pull it out and, even with the considerable resistance of the water, manages to gut the diver who shot him with that same harpoon. Not to be outdone, another bad guy slices through Conrad's air hose. Now, here's where the "gosh, he's without oxygen" clock starts ticking. Before Conrad surfaces, all of the following happen: bad guy smashes Conrad's mask, shattering the glass (just love how they can get off hits strong and fast enough to do this kind of stuff in the water), Conrad sees his life flash before his eyes, once he opens his eyes again, the bad guys are gone and he's looking at a brick of C4 explosive and numbers that are counting down, 1 minute 10 secs later, he's still trying to break free of a skeleton (don't ask), he smashes the finger bones of this skeleton with the skull from same skeleton, the submarine, in the meantime, is tilting into the abyss, Conrad shoots up from the submarine and is able to make "long scissor kicks across the wake and over the rim of the crater..." (remember, he's still not breathing), Conrad sees a giant pillar of fire shoot from the depths and to avoid this, he "started swimming as fast as he could...he surfaces a minute later..." Wow, who knew someone could do all that without breathing. And his rapid rise to the surface didn't even give him the bends. All this by page 12.

3.) Conrad's love interest is Sister Serena Serghetti, a Roman Catholic nun, who hobnobs with the rich and powerful in a backless Vera Wang and who has an on again, off again attraction to Conrad. One she apparently hasn't indulged: "The sheer audacity of Conrad's selection of such a romantic locale, and this while he was on the run, amazed and angered her. A virgin like her wouldn't last the night at a place like this, especially with a man like him."

4.) Cheesy dialog. Example - Serena to Conrad: ""Squeeze her for information. She might confess some things to you that she wouldn't to a nun." He looked at her with contempt. "You want me to sleep with her because your vows keep you from sleeping with Midas?" "Something like that," she said.... "You're just a cast-iron bitch with a crucifix, aren't you? he said."

Don't waste your time on this one - there are other thrillers out there with better writing and more coherent story lines.

There are some really great storytellers out there, and Thomas Greanias is not one of them. I run into this type of author from time to time, and wonder what their lives look like. The shallowness of interactions and thought processes depicted in the book - can this really be as deep as Mr. Greanias experiences life? Or is it that he just does not have the skill to create the words to describe a deeper interaction between human beings?

Of course I cannot answer that question, although I have to wonder if it is not the former rather than the latter.

The story shallowness is not just around human interaction, but also about belief systems. The description of thinking process and dogma being the first and foremost dominates the book. Specifically, green-centric hysterical thinking around the lines "save the planet - kill people" is one of the dominant dogmas represented.

No doubt there are people out there who actually think this way, although the reasoning displayed in the book is unlikely to be representative of how they actually think. Or at least one would hope that they are not this shallow....

Frankly, I cannot force myself to read all the way through a book like this. I managed to make it almost through chapter 7 when I couldn't take it anymore.

There are too many good authors out there, why waste time with one who writes like this?

I was already a fan of Thomas' previous two books, 'Raising Atlantis' & 'The Atlantis Prophecy' - both of those were rollicking fun, totally entertaining, and a great way to escape on intriguing adventures for a few reading hours. I am happy to say that 'The Atlantis Revelation' is a worthy successor in the Atlantis trilogy. It is smart, well-researched, has loads of action, and presents fascinating concepts that kept me interested the whole way through. It takes the reader on a whirlwind journey to interesting places - from Corfu & the Calypso Deep to Azerbaijan to Rhodes to Jerusalem and more.

Mr. Greanias is a talented thriller author who never disappoints. His characters are well-fleshed out & jump off the page with life. His storytelling skills are solid. I have read thrillers and adventure novels where authors got so engrossed in the details of place and technology that they let the story drop, drag, and sometimes nearly evaporate. A thriller needs to be fast-paced with enough detail to make the setting come alive for the reader, but always keeping the story strong and at the forefront of the reader's attention. Thomas strikes that balance perfectly. You can rest assured when you pick up any of the books in the Atlantis trilogy that you will be turning pages super fast.

Great entertainment, highly recommended!

Rai Aren, co-author of Secret of the Sands

I enjoyed the first two books and was expecting, based on the title of the third book, that we'd see more information and progress on the links to Atlantis. Sadly, the book doesn't deliver on either the topic of Atlantis or the mediocre story and as a result you spend most of your time reading the book and hanging on for the major revelation which never comes. I sincerely hope that the author will rectify the major oversights in his next book.