Customer Reviews

Lost Cities of Africa and Arabia (The Lost City Series)

5 star:		(3)
4 star:		(5)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(3)

 

 

David Hatcher Childress' Lost Cities series has proven to be consistently interesting, and Lost Cities and Ancient Mysteries of Africa and Arabia is no exception. Taking the everyman approach to travel writing, Childress' accounts of his travels through Arabia and Egypt are very interesting and insightful, full of both interesting travel advice relevant to the regions he travelled through and accounts of personal experiences that make his stories very interesting to read. He thoroughly covers all of the major and most of the minor historical sites to be found throughout Africa and Arabia, often at great personal risk. It took guts to make the journeys he has made, many of which were in areas very dangerous for Americans, and a talent for writing to make them interesting. I thoroughly recommend this and all of the other Lost Cities series of books to all would-be travelers with an open mind and an interest in the unusual.

Ok, let's get one thing out of the way. David Childress is not an archeologist. Some people seem to get hung up on this, so let's make that real clear. I always see his books in the "Travel Narrative" section of the bookstore, and that's exactly what they are... great travel narratives.

The books has two modes. Mr. Childress' travel stories, and his telling of "wacky" theories of the places he visits. Within the first 25 pages, you have stories of ancient nuclear weapons, flying machines, and continent spanning civilizations that no one has heard of! And he explains that this is the "easiest" way of rationalizing the things he has seen! (Such as, giant blocks of stone that are too big to move, "even by modern engineering").

On the whole, this is a great read if you want some insight into the crazy ideas that exist out there. Childress seems to have a mainline into most of them. His travel writing is pretty good too.

One note: the editing is terrible. Spelling and typos all over the place. The typography & layout of the book do leave something to be desired.

I picked up this book not realizing that I had already read excerpts from it in another of Childress' books. I was headed for Jordan and was interested in reading up on Petra when I found this book. As I read more, it began to get really interesting. His broad coverage of various theories of ancient civilizations is fascinating, if sometimes hard to believe. But, that being said, there are so many unexplained civilizations out there that, however fanciful the explanations may be, who knows, some may even be correct!! It's an entertaining read, and really causes you to reconsider some very basic historical facts that may turn out to be in error. How DID those guys at the Temple of Ba'al move 2 million pound stones?!? Makes you wonder!!

David Hatcher Childress makes no secret of the fact that he supports the diffusionist, as opposed to the isolationist view of prehistory (i.e. he believes there was more contact between various ancient civilisations than is generally supposed by academics). Whether one swallows DHC's views on Atlantis or the 'Osirian Empire' is really beside the point, as this book's value lies primarily in its entertaining and evocative travelogue, not in any pretensions to accuracy. Even if DHC's theories are completely bogus, his books still make entertaining reading.

The reviewers who dismiss DHC's books as worthless because he isn't a scientist and engages in speculation (sample sentence: "1932 was a good year for mysterious ancient roads in Kenya") are themselves remarkably clown-like in their earnest simplicity. The book provides an argument against them in the form of a great quote from Robert Louis Stevenson: "for God's sake give me a young man who has brains enough to make a fool of himself!"

Previous African travelogues I read include Shiva Naipaul's 'North of South' and Paul Theroux's 'Dark Star Safari', both of them sardonic, near-misanthropic works. While DHC doesn't have a literary style to match those accomplished authors, his wide-eyed optimism and childlike sense of adventure at least make an interesting contrast to the jaded cynicism of Naipaul and Theroux.

As one would expect from someone who has hitchhiked through the Middle East and Africa, DHC is full of entertaining travel tales and encounters with amusing characters, like the Palestinian truck driver he gets a lift with in Jordan who makes an unexpected stop at a tent in the desert, which turns out to be a brothel, then emerges minutes later zipping his pants up, saying "no good, no good..."

In Israel he is taken to hospital with gangrene, and just as he is about to be treated, finds the place is suddenly deserted. The doctors have all gone home for the sabbath, and he has to wait another two days for treatment...

One part of the book that intrigued me dealt with the mysterious Tuaregs of the Ahaggar mountains in southern Algeria. Their chief town is called Tamanrasset (i.e. Taman-Ra-Set)...a survival of ancient Egyptian paganism in a remote pocket of the Islamic world? The Arabs are said to be afraid of these mountains, and many eerie and surrealistic tales are told of them.

DHC's book will appeal to those who like hitchhiking travel stories, or those who like esoteric speculation (or both). I doubt it will appeal to puritanical empiricists, but there are plenty of other books they can read instead.

There is no other book on Africa, or Arabia, like this one! Like in his other books, Childress rambles from place to place looking for mysteries, lost cities, and adventure. If you are looking for some dry fossil hunter story, this isn't it. It's the only book that I know of that covers such unusual topics as port cities in the middle of the Arabian Desert, the history of the Ark of the Covenant, the giant megaliths of the Kalahari Desert and other little-discussed topics. Lots of old maps, photos and illustrations. It is a fun book to browse through as well.

I think this book is great. I love DHC's writing style and humor. His perspective is refreshing and clever -- a book of discovery as travel is -- new discoveries around every corner!

Let's face it: this isn't a very good book. Then again, "Godzilla vs. Monster Zero" wasn't a very "good" (if we must assign labels) movie. Childress, a "maverick archaeologist" who seems to spend most of his time floundering around grimly impoverished Third World locales and getting nowhere with evasive women at bars, provides an insanely amusing travelogue of his journeys through the jungles and exotic landscapes of Africa and Arabia, commenting along the way on the unknown Atlantean, Lemurian, and other civilizations that flourished once upon a time and were responsible for the Pyramids, THE MAHABHARATA, and presumably Jimmy Hoffa's and D.B. Cooper's whereabouts. The most insane thing about this book is that a lot of it might be true. So far as I know, we still know very little about the Neolithic era, and the concept of "lost" civilizations would imaginably appeal to many readers depressed at the state of the world (including myself). However, I must agree with the other negative reviewer that Childress offers no convincing evidence to support his theories (and not very much UNconvincing evidence, either). The only sources he uses are hopelessly mossbound Victorian "explorers" (who knows how many African bearers' lives they may have used up to supply this book with fodder for speculation?) who had their own "issues" to deal with. Don't even get me started on the possible cultural-studies implications of this book. That being said, it WAS a lot of fun, and he does occasionally come up with some exciting memories and fantastical theories that NEARLY make up for my having read this book.

I've read all of Childress's lost cities books, and this is one of my favorites. It is one of the first books to challenge the dogma that the great Sphinx and the Osirion of Egypt are over 10,000 years old. The Lost Cities Series is a fascinating series of books, written with humor, insight, depth and astoning knowledge of the ancient past. --Richard Noone

What a disappointment. This book is about 50% self-centered travelogue and 50% teasers about the mysteries. I expected a book full of archeological information about cities and cultures that have long since disappeared, but instead got embarrassingly ridiculous chit-chat and superficial explanations. I wanted scientific information, not a book that tends to explain most of its mysteries via levitation and alien beings!

this, another book in the Lost Cities Series, arrived quickly and in excellent condition. i've had fun reading them one by one.