The Sunken Kingdom

This is a curious piece of work. Peter James is not an academic, but a popular writer; however, he has a thorough grounding in academic research, and his work is most often dignified and useful. This has the making of a first-rate piece of research: the solution it proposes is built on very well-grounded view of the evolution of Greek legend, and involves a minimum of unlikelihoods (although some of it depends on whwther we can expect a Greek noble family to preserve traditions altogether unknown outside its circle, since James' solution involves the handing down of garbled accounts of a major disaster into Plato's own family, which was very blue-blooded indeed). Indeed, if it was a matter of the theory alone, I would say that James is probably right and recommend this book unreservedly.However, there are features about it that remind us that James is a popularizer, not to say a vulgarizer. The historical account of the theory of Atlantis is justified and pleasant, but the silly partisan defence of Plato is simply overblown posturing verging on the crankish; nor does Plato need it. This is a valid piece of work, but one could wish that James had given it a different shape.

This book, as you may know, is about Atlantis. But it provides a generous amount of information about a variety of related topics which is bound to amaze the reader. This is not really pro-Atlantean, in other words the author doesn't believe that there once existed a super-civilized continent that disappeared into nothing. So, no science-fiction or whizzing hover-cars or much about the story-book Atlantis at all. Instead you get a purely scientific account which can be a bit hard to get used to, but which ends up as an extremely interesting piece of work. Recommended.