Resumo de Mysteries From Forgotten Worlds

Charles Berlitz has forged a writing career on both sides of the wall that divides safe, acceptable and factual works and the more speculative and controversial subjects. On the one hand he is known for a string of highly regarded travel guides but it is the other Charles Berlitz that I find fascinating. As a by-product of the travelling he had to do to establish his name as a publisher of travel guides he has been able to indulge his passion for alternative history theories. His books have covered subjects such as Atlantis and the Bermuda Triangle, but whilst his work in these areas has largely been superseded in the forty years since they were published one book has managed to retain its value up to the present day."Mysteries from Forgotten Worlds" was first published in 1962 and has since been re-issued a number of times, but largely without any alterations, thus indicating the value of the original research. What Berlitz put together in this book was an overview of locations and theories that did not fit easily into our accepted understanding of ancient history. There is another wall to be breached here, to use the opening analogy. Our understanding of history sits in an orderly fashion back to the earliest stirrings of civilization in Egypt and the Fertile Crescent region of the Middle East. On the other side of this imaginary wall that demarks our safe ordered creation of our past, is a place where credible academics fear to tread, it is a place of anomalies and ideas that don't support our view of mans development and so it is a place to be avoided if a career in the dusty halls of academia is to be maintain. Thankfully Berlitz had no problem with knocking holes in this wall and looking at these non-fit ideas and this book is a collection of his findings. None of these are new ideas and link in closely with other writers of the time, most notably Charles Hapgood whose classic work "Maps of the Ancient Sea Kings" was published around the same time. What makes this book work is that it deliberately steers itself away from any sensational hypothesis. In an era that saw the likes of Erich Von Danikien promoting an ancient astronauts as the solution to almost every challenge laid before him, Berlitz was happier to just present the facts and at most proffer the idea that mans cultural evolution has a longer history than we currently give it credit for. Many have seen this as just another book about Atlantis as there is a fair bit of talk about it. But really we need to define what we mean by the term. The idea of an island in ancient times sinking below the Atlantic waves and taking with it an advanced civilization is the creation of Hollywood and pulp writers. If the idea of Atlantis represents a global culture, which has left evidence of its passing, evidence that does not fit our current view of history, in places all over the world, then yes this is very much a book about Atlantis.Although many will see this as a "coffee table" book on the subject, that is one that can be picked up for short periods of time and read in a string of short bursts, its value should not be overlooked. Writers such as Graham Hancock and Andrew Collins in more recent times have clearly revisited what Berlitz brought to the public eye with books such as this. The value of a book such as this is that it offers a fantastic starting point to the subject of alternative ancient history and "forbidden" archaeology. It is an easy read, avoiding as it does any major all encompassing theory or complex technical information. It can even be read as selected chapters if there is one or two areas only that the reader is interested in. And if there is a message in the book at all it is that civilizations may rise and fall to be forgotten by subsequent generations leaving only fingerprints in the later age, fingerprints that when examined may give us a better understanding of a forgotten past.

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