Customer Reviews

A Hitchhiker's Guide to Armageddon (Lost Cities Series)

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I was saddened to learn that "A Hitchhiker's Guide to Armageddon" would be the last book in the popular Lost Cities Series by my friend and publisher David Hatcher Childress. (David is the Head Honcho at Adventures Unlimited Press who published my 1998 book "HAARP, The Ultimate Weapon of the
Conspiracy"). I have always been an armchair archeologist (well, at least since the third grade). As such I have repeatedly found vicarious delight in tramping the globe with David in these books. Many reviewers have called him "the Real Indiana Jones" -- which I won't deny, except to point out that, on the rare occasions when he's home, he hangs his Fedora in Illinois.

My favorite thing about this series of books written by David Hatcher Childress is that he is an unaffected, unpretentious writer - which is to say, he writes like he talks. Each book reads like a conversation with David. It is easy to imagine one's self in the World Explorer's Club HQ in Kempton, Illinois, as I was earlier this year, listening to David recount his latest adventure in some exotic location, his voice soft with
understatement, his eyes twinkling at his little jests. I can clearly see him, at several points in the story, getting up and pointing out some artifact on the Club House walls, which are festooned with mementos of member's treks about the globe. "Oh! This," he says, touching a strange black object of iron chains and colored glass, "This is a lantern I picked up in a bazaar in Cairo last month." He achieves the same effect in his books by profusely illustrating them with photos and diagrams, facsimiles of ancient manuscripts, and the like.

In "A Hitchhiker's Guide to Armageddon" David invites you to tag along with him as he sets out on his wildest adventure yet, in search of the Apocalypse and The End Times! The story opens with you waking in your sleeping bag with flies crawling over your face somewhere in a Middle Eastern desert on the road to the Hill of Megiddo, the site of the legendary fortress in northern Israel where Armageddon is prophesied to start. It's a long hitchhike around the world from there; David leading you from one adventure to the next -- from mysterious tunnels running for hundreds, perhaps thousands of miles beneath South America, to ancient cities in the deserts of China, to legends of worlds before our own.

In this last Lost Cities book David really cuts loose. You'll find him musing on the rise and fall of civilizations and the forces that have shaped mankind over the millennia; including wars, invasions and cataclysms. In his comfortable, at ease before a roaring campfire style, David discusses such unsettling subjects as ancient wars of the past -- including evidence for
ancient atomic wars -- and relates that dim past with the present, and the much prophesied apocalyptic future.

Like a good roller coaster "A Hitchhiker's Guide to Armageddon" is a fun and scary ride. When I was a child all the rides at Disneyland required tickets, and the "E" ticket rides were the best. "A Hitchhiker's Guide to Armageddon" is definitely an "E" ticket ride!

David Childress' A Hitchhiker's Guide to Armageddon is not your standard travel guide, nor is it for the faint of heart; the voyages so compellingly described within it pages are as much metaphorical as physical, for it charts mankind's heedless path toward self-destruction in the past, present, and future. From the legendary fortress Megiddo in Israel, where Armageddon is prophesied to start, to Namibia and Botswana in 1979, to the Final Stand of the Knights Templar and the space-based Death Star, A Hitchhiker's Guide to Armageddon pulls out all the stops in a chilling, brutal tour of humanity's most precipitous failings. Especially recommended for anyone with an interest in reading or writing apocalyptic literature.

Steamshovel Press ally Childress does an off-the-wall finale to his "Lost Cities" series, which documents his picaresque adventures around the world. Previous "Lost Cities" books have been geared toward specific world locations, like North Africa, Asia, North and Central America, etc. This one takes on "Armageddon," although it begins at the Megiddo fortress, site of several great battles mentioned in the Bible and where legend has it the battle of Armageddon will begin. The most interesting chapter is entitled "Lawyers, Guns and Money", detailing Childress' legal adventures, including those shared with Steamshovel's Kenn Thomas. Thomas and Childress were taken to court by the former roommate of David Ferrie, Lee Harvey Oswald's albino pilot pal.

Steamshovel Press ally Childress does an off-the-wall finale to his "Lost Cities" series, which documents his picaresque adventures around the world. Previous "Lost Cities" books have been geared toward specific world locations, like North Africa, Asia, North and Central America, etc. This one takes on "Armageddon," although it begins at the Megiddo fortress, site of several great battles mentioned in the Bible and where legend has it the battle of Armageddon will begin. The most interesting chapter is entitled "Lawyers, Guns and Money", detailing Childress' legal adventures, including those shared with Steamshovel's Kenn Thomas. Thomas and Childress were taken to court by the former roommate of David Ferrie, Lee Harvey Oswald's albino pilot pal.