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    Finding Atlantis: A True Story of Genius, Madness, and an Extraordinary Quest for a Lost World
    Unavailable
    Finding Atlantis: A True Story of Genius, Madness, and an Extraordinary Quest for a Lost World
    Unavailable
    Finding Atlantis: A True Story of Genius, Madness, and an Extraordinary Quest for a Lost World
    Ebook407 pages5 hours

    Finding Atlantis: A True Story of Genius, Madness, and an Extraordinary Quest for a Lost World

    By David King

    4/5

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    Currently unavailable

    Currently unavailable

    About this ebook

    The untold story of a fascinating Renaissance man on an adventurous hunt for a lost civilization—an epic quest through castles, courts, mythologies, and the spectacular world of the imagination.

    What do Zeus, Apollo, and the gods of Mount Olympus have in common with Odin, Thor, and the gods of Valhalla? What do these, in turn, have to do with the shades of Hades, the pharaohs of Egypt, and the glories of fabled Atlantis? In 1679, Olof Rudbeck stunned the world with the answer: They could all be traced to an ancient lost civilization that once thrived in the far north of Rudbeck’s native Sweden. He would spend the last thirty years of his life hunting for the evidence that would prove this extraordinary theory.

    Chasing down clues to that lost golden age, Rudbeck combined the reasoning of Sherlock Holmes with the daring of Indiana Jones. He excavated what he thought was the acropolis of Atlantis, retraced the journeys of classical heroes, opened countless burial mounds, and consulted rich collections of manuscripts and artifacts. He eventually published his findings in a 2,500-page tome titled Atlantica, a remarkable work replete with heroic quests, exotic lands, and fabulous creatures.

    Three hundred years later, the story of Rudbeck’s adventures appears in English for the first time. It is a thrilling narrative of discovery as well as a cautionary tale about the dangerous dance of genius and madness.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherRandom House Publishing Group
    Release dateJun 7, 2005
    ISBN9780307238313
    Unavailable
    Finding Atlantis: A True Story of Genius, Madness, and an Extraordinary Quest for a Lost World
    Author

    David King

    David King is the New York Times bestselling author of Death in the City of Light, Vienna 1814, and Finding Atlantis. A Fulbright Scholar with a master's degree from Cambridge University, King taught European history before becoming a full-time writer. His books have been translated into several languages, including Chinese, Turkish, Polish, Korean, Italian, Swedish and Russian. Film rights have been sold in Death in the City of Light.

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    Reviews for Finding Atlantis

    4/5

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    • 4/5
      By and large this is a straightforward biographical account of Olof Rudbeck, a Swedish academic, anatomist, and historian who worked for many years on a theory that Atlantis was located near Uppsala. King's focal point is the Atlantean theory and the great (and sometimes very imaginative) lengths to which Rudbeck went to find evidence for his theory. But Rudbeck's other work (on the human lymphatic system, botany, &c.) does not go unmentioned.A good read, with some tantalizing elements about possible forgeries tossed in; those I certainly want to know more about!
    • 5/5

      I was astonished by how much I enjoyed this book, which I devoured in a single day. Olof Rudbeck was the discoverer of the lymph system, a keen astronomer, a composer, a singer, an instrumentalist, a top-flight architect -- in short, a sort of paradigm for Renaissance Man (the plant genus Rudbeckia was named in honour of him and his son, another Olof) -- yet he devoted most of his life to an attempt to prove first that Sweden was the land of the Hyperboreans and then that Atlantis was in fact Swden, with its capital at Old Uppsala. What was disconcerting for me was that, if we ignore those of his claims that were obviously just products of a fevered overenthusiasm, he actually made a pretty good case for his thesis, one that was hailed by, inter alia, the Royal Society and Sir Isaac Newton. The real reason his monumental book (or books, because the expansions in later editions far surpassed in extent the original version) has been forgotten is that, shortly after his death, Sweden stumbled from being a major power to humiliation as a conquered, looted nation.

      King's style is highly readable, on rare occasion verging, it has to be admitted, on the facile, and one or two interesting strands of background international politics seem to get forgotten before, chapters later, being rather summarily tied off; if I could give the book 4.8 or 4.9 stars rather than 5, I would. But overall? Highly recommended.