Lost Cities and Ancient Mysteries of South America

This was the first book I read in Childress' "Lost Cities" series, every single one of which is impossible to put down. It is an incredible journey of a man's attempt to unite myth and fact and propose new explanations for historical events and archaeological enigmas. I cannot imagine anyone but the most jaded and cynical reader not enjoying this, regardless of whether you agree with the author's hypotheses or not. I will say though that if you are an officer in the Grammar Police it will drive you crazy at times. I hesitate to blame the author, however. I suspect that if the books in this series had an editor, which seems unlikely, than that person should have chosen another profession. If you are the type that cannot get beyond that then perhaps you should avoid the book but for anyone looking for a highly entertaining, thought-provoking take on history, travel and archaeology do not hesitate to buy every single book in this series.

I have read the other reviews that ridicule David who I have actually met a few times and found certain reviews to be extremely arrogant or stuffed shirt. David has explored places that 99% of the Earth's population does not even know exist. Some people will whine about Davids credentials. They say that David is only a traveler and is not an archaeologist, yet the American heritage dictionary discribes an archaeologist as someone who engages in the systematic recovery and scientific study of material evidence of human life and culture in past ages. Also the study antiquity. Websters defines an archaeologist as the study of the life of ancient peoples, as by excavation of ancient cities or artifacts. There is nothing in there that says a person must have a degree from some stuffed shirt university to be an archaeologist. David is what one might call self taught. As a young man he would take off with a back pack and explore what was available in Colorado and Montana. He then at 19 if Im not mistaken took off on a 6 year treck across the globe in search of the places that he at that time had only read about. The thing that David does is he dives into theorys that the stuffed shirts would just as well ignore because there are discoveries that do not fit their conventional theorys. If the stuffed shirts began to consider the evidence that might be completely and contradictory to their already set in stone belief and if the evidence is so strong that they may have to admitt that everything that they had believed was wrong,then that may cause problems that they do not want to have to face, so that kind of evidence is just ignored or dismissed. Besides, that might upset funding if they are willing to publicly consider unorthadox theories. It is much easier to ridicule someone like David than it is to take a look at what he has discovered or has brought to the publics attention. This man has dedicated his life to exploring forgotten civilizations and the stuffed shirts have had a hard time with that. It has only been recently that they have been forced to look at the evidence that has FINALLY been discovered after so many years like the under water structures that were found off the coast of Yonagoni in 1988 by a Japanese shark fisherman. Somebody made a snide comment about the suggestion that there may still be living dinosaurs. Well David checks out stories with the people from those areas who have lived in those places where those sightings have taken place rather than just believe what the text books teach. When there have been so many reports for so many years of these creatures being sighted in remote locations and the ancient pictures show images of dinosaur type creatures on rocks like in Peru or in the Mediterranean where there are paintings and sculptures of people and dinosaurs in the same images. Let me ask this question, "how could the ancients have known about dinosaurs if they died out 65,000,000 years ago?" Because they did not die

Having read other Childress books, I found this book to be of the same calibre. His discussions on how the ancient peruvian cities with the megalithic stones really makes teh reader wonder what technology that humans as a civilisation have lost. The parts on the secret nazi city was very interesting to read, but one wonders how plausible it is. Of great interest to me was how Childress interacted with the people in the different countries of South America, and learned how not to get ripped off.

Childress leaves almost no stone unturned as he leads the reader into unknown worlds in a personal quest to encounter and document the lost cities, pyramids, and megaliths of South and Central America. The ones he missed are the perfect spherical stones of Costa Rica documented in the AUP publication ATLANTIS IN AMERICA: NAVIGATORS OF THE ANCIENT WORLD.

This book is great fun. Rumor has it that the editor deleted sections on spontaneous human combustion and other mysteries while the author was off on an expedition. Hmmm....