Gateway to Atlantis: The Search for the Source of a Lost Civilization
Proceeding from the adage that absence of evidence is not evidence of absence, Collins navigates through the ancient and medieval references to Atlantis, of which not an iota of indisputable archaeological evidence has ever surfaced. He restrains credulousness in the text with conditional constructions and never imperatively claims that any particular detail proves Atlantis existed. Read the book on Collins' terms, and he proves an engaging conductor of an exegetical tour of Plato's writings about a civilization on an island in the Western Ocean that colonized bits of Europe but vanished when a natural catastrophe befell its homeland. Collins discounts the proposition that the 1500 B.C. eruption of Thera, which coincided with the decline of Minoan civilization, underlies the Atlantis story. Instead, he fields a blizzard of propositions; these, in a nutshell, propose that a Phoenician colony in Iberia might have had transoceanic contact with the Olmec and other Meso-American civilizations. Accept the what-if-ness of Collins' views, and his book may enamor imaginations sparked by the legend of lost Atlantis.Gilbert TaylorCopyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved