Reviews for The Lost Colony of the Templars: Verrazano's Secret Mission to America

The average rating for The Lost Colony of the Templars: Verrazano's Secret Mission to America based on 2 reviews is 3.5 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2013-10-09 00:00:00 Maryellen Stamos By including just enough historical fact to keep one interested in the speculative thread with which he weaves his tale, Steven Sora presents yet another investigative journalist's stab at being a historian. Reading like the conspiracy theory it is, The Lost Colony of the Templars is full of phrases like "could possibly mean," "might be associated with," "may point to." Sora explains "hidden" meanings and gives the location of "secret" places. (If they are secret, how does he know about them? If the meaning is hidden, why is his interpretation correct?) He draws heavily from such books as "Holy Blood, Holy Grail" which have been thoroughly exposed as baseless speculation--a tale woven from whole cloth. There are few historians who would dispute the fact that there were a number of explorers who "found" the American continents long before Christopher Columbus. Public high schools have taught about Leif Ericson arriving five or more hundred years before Columbus since at least the 1940s. The notion of buried treasure in the Western Hemisphere runs strong, whether attributed to lost civilizations like Cibola or El Dorado or to pirates like Blackbeard or Lafitte. Now it is popular to tie the Templars and Masons to vast treasure buried anywhere from New England and the Mid Atlantic to the Rocky Mountains. Steven Sora raises a number of interesting questions about the origins and possible connections to Europe of various structures and archaeological finds in North America. I'm not sure I can swallow all of the answers he proposes to those questions. What his book does, rather than answering questions, (for me, at least) is spawn a desire to do more investigating.

Review # 2 was written on 2016-01-22 00:00:00 Keith Younger This is a very interesting book and seems reasonably researched. Some may conclude there's too much guessing but the book seems to flow with within reason of the time and historical background. Again it seems widely known there was a 'New World' long before Columbus left Spain's shores.