Reviews for Vathek

The average rating for Vathek based on 2 reviews is 4.5 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2014-01-10 00:00:00 Aaron Cook This was one of the most fascinating books I've ever read. No, really. 1. You get excerpts from flood stories from every culture in the world (believe me, there are a lot!) 2. You get comparative 'mythology', religion, history and culture. 3. You get a glimpse of how archaeologists / historians thought of these things 100 years ago, when it was all first coming to the surface. 4. You can see the scary turn racism took in the first half of the 20th century. For me, that was interesting. Terrifying, but interesting. Because it's not something I was ever taught, and psychologically, I found myself wondering just how half the planet could have got swept away by ideas that were ultimately founded in a belief that we descended from the stars. You don't see that mentioned in WW2 documentaries on the History Channel, do you? But it's true. I've come across it so many times. And I think it's an important part of our history because it demonstrates the power of belief and stories. And I think that's very relevant to the modern world and the irrational wars and hate people still wage against each other. How will it ever stop if we don't look back on this stuff and see how insane it is. I should note that I didn't get the impression the author of this book was racist. At one point, he actually states categorically that he believes every 'white' person in the world is partly 'black', as part of his hypothesis that the whole world was once one unified race that later spread in the aftermath of the great deluge. But he quoted a number of other 'great thinkers' from his time who, frankly, scared me. Yet these people seem to have been in the US Congress, etc. We like to think the Germans were alone in Naziism, but it was rife everywhere - including America. I think we shouldn't gloss over that. At any rate - a really, really interesting book that gave me a lot more to think about than I expected.

Review # 2 was written on 2012-12-07 00:00:00 Andre Walker Even though I disagree almost entirely with everything Donnelly has to say about Atlantis, I enjoyed this. He raises a lot of intriguing questions about the similarities between ancient human societies across the world which still have not been satisfactorily explained by modern science. Most interesting were the similarities in myths, suggesting that either we all make up the same stories, or we have common memories of something else.