As a travel writer, author, broadcaster, speaker, and producer, I’ve reported from over 100 countries on 7 continents for major print and digital publications worldwide and networks like National Geographic and Travel Channel. I kicked off my career with a solo, 12-month round-the-world backpacking adventure, largely inspired by the formative books I read below. Embracing the world with insatiable curiosity, an open heart, an open mind, a sense of humour, and enthusiasm to share my stories clearly resonated. Here I am, two decades later, author of a half-dozen bestselling books that focus on my own eclectic travels, which will hopefully inspire others as these books inspired me.
You don’t find the right book; sometimes, it finds you.
I stumbled upon a Graham Hancock lecture in the early 1990s, and he came across as reasonable, sincere, well-researched, and highly intelligent. Reading his books–which occupy the realm between history, travelogue, and science–inspired me to visit South America and Ethiopia. They also inspired me to keep an open mind and chase new ideas.
Decades later, with a hit Netflix series under his belt, Hancock gets a lot of flak for his theories of alternative archeology and history, but his popular books continue to challenge popular wisdom while providing curious readers a literary ticket to exotic destinations.
With over 5 million copies sold worldwide of Fingerprints of the Gods, its New York Times bestselling sequel Magicians of the Gods brings new evidence supporting Hancock's thesis that a global cataclysm wiped out a great global civilization.
On the heels of the very successful hardcover edition, Hancock returns with this paperback version including three new chapters brimming with recent reporting of fresh scientific advances (ranging from DNA to astrophysics) that substantially support his case.
Twenty years ago, Graham Hancock published Fingerprints of the Gods an astonishing, deeply controversial investigation of the mysteries of and the evidence for Earth's lost…
I’ve been an explorer since I was young. My first short trip was to Cahokia Mounds, a site so little is known about that researchers have yet to discover the name of the people who built the famous city of mounds. As I grew into an adult, I was drawn to visit the Pyramid of Chichen Itza in Mexico and Stonehenge in England. As a writer, I decided the one thing missing from the mysterious places field was a fun way to learn about them. So I wrote a mysterious places book in a trivia game format, as learning something new is always more fun when presented as a game.
In this book, Robert M. Schoch challenges the mainstream belief of mere coincidence regarding the prevalence of pyramids worldwide.
Schoch explores mysterious geographical and historical examples, from ancient Egyptians to Buddhists and the Mississippi Indians; Schoch argues that ancient cultures shared a common vision of these majestic structures. He believes ancient sailors from Southeast Asia spread the concept of pyramids throughout the world, even reaching the Americas.
Schoch presents a thoughtful, well-reasoned theory that proposes the possibilities of cross-cultural exchange. I really enjoyed Schoch’s thinking, supported by solid evidence from this Boston University Geology professor.
Is it a mere coincidence that pyramids are found throughout our globe? Did cultures ranging across vast spaces in geography and time, such as the ancient Egyptians; early Bud-dhists; the Maya, Inca, Toltec, and Aztec civilizations of the Americas; the Celts of the British Isles; and even the Mississippi Indians of pre-Columbus Illinois, simply dream the same dreams and envision the same structures?
Robert M. Schoch-one of the world's preeminent geologists in recasting the date of the building of the Great Sphinx-believes otherwise. In this dramatic and meticulously reasoned book, Schoch, like anthropologist Thor Heyerdahl in his classic Kon-Tiki, argues…
I am a veterinarian who has worked extensively with African Wildlife in the heart of the African bush. I have also met African Sangoma’s, witch doctors. I have made a study of African mysticism and Ancestral communications and have participated in African mystic rituals, including the cleansing ritual called smudging or burning of herbs and utilizing the smoke for spiritual cleansing. In my books, I fuse my knowledge of African wildlife, African customs and rituals, and my innate ability to tell a good story and have brought forth the Jamie James series. They are quintessential African Adventures taking place in the heart of the African bush.
The Sunbird was Wilber Smith’s first book. It was one of the first books on Wild African Adventure that I read and has kindled in me a lifelong passion for Africa, African animals, and the love of wildlife. It was a reason that I became a veterinarian and that I wanted to work with African Wildlife. It is a mix of contemporary and historic African Fiction. It is memorable because it is a wonderful story that I would want to share around the fire in a camp somewhere in the heart of the African bush. I would want Wilbur Smith to tell me the story as we sit around the fire. It evokes all that is magical and wonderful about Africa, the continent I love and live on. The book taught me that the story is paramount. Not the skill of the author as a literary giant. I want to…
A photograph and a curse are the only clues Dr Ben Kazin has before he stumbles on the archaeological discovery. Beneath the red cliffs of Botswanaland a civilization has remained buried for millennia. But the magic of uncovering a lost culture is interrupted by the violence of terrorists, love, intrigue and the secrets of centuries.
I’ve been interested in ancient Egypt ever since I read Asterix and Cleopatra when I was a boy. The hilarious moment of Obelix accidentally knocking off the Sphinx’s nose has always stayed with me in particular. By my early twenties, I was reading authors like Graham Hancock, Robert Bauval, and Colin Wilson, who showed me that what we think we know about ancient Egypt is not wholly correct. For instance, there’s little evidence that the Great Pyramid’s purpose was to be a tomb and the Sphinx seems to be much older than Egyptologists believe. In 2010, at thirty-four years old, I finally got to visit the wonders of Egypt myself.
Much of the key stuff that’s mentioned in the books above are contained in Heaven’s Mirror by the great Graham Hancock and his wife Santha Faiia. So, the book’s a great place to start if you’re new to all this rethinking ancient Egypt malarkey. Heaven’s Mirror also covers other civilizations like the Mayans and Incas. For me, this book is so special because it contains some absolutely glorious and spellbinding photos of key ancient sites in Egypt, such as Karnak, Dendera, Abydos, and the pyramids of Giza, Dashur, and Saqqara, which I was lucky enough to visit myself and which I wrote about in The Road To Purification.
This is the sequel to the international bestseller, "Fingerprints of the Gods". In very different parts of the world, evidence exists of a common legacy - shared by cultures separated by hundreds, sometimes thousands of years. From Mexico to Iceland, Cambodia to Easter Island, China to Egypt, we are finding a common astronomical wisdom handed down from a time before history, a time perhaps before the 'Great Flood'. This book addresses a common wisdom from a lost civilisation which might hold the key to our own identity on earth. "Heaven's Mirror" is a personal quest for the answer - the…
I've been fond of the Homeric poems since my youth. I followed classical studies in the high here in Rome, so I studied Latin and Greek before graduating in nuclear engineering. Then, in addition to my professional activity, I've devoted myself to the study of The Iliad and the Odyssey, with their huge contradictions between geography and their traditional Mediterranean setting. The book I published on this topic was translated and published into eight foreign languages (as The Baltic Origins of Homer's Epic Tales), and has given rise to many scientific discussions. I also published The Mysteries of the Megalithic Civilization, a Bestseller here in Italy.
Based on the "radiocarbon revolution" as a method of dating archaeological finds, the great English archaeologist Sir Colin Renfrew redraws the map of the dawn of civilization in the Mediterranean basin and in Europe. The result is a new framework, in which the idea of a single cradle, located between Egypt and the Middle East, from which civilization would have spread to the rest of Europe, is replaced by the identification of different places where it started, scattered throughout the continent.
The refinement of radiocarbon dating using the information form tree-ring counts has raised serious doubts about the accepted theoretical frameowkr of European prehistory. Monuments in Central and Western Europe have proved to be considerably older than their supposed Near-Eastern forerunners, and the record must be almost completely rewritten in the light of these new dates. Before Civilsation is a preliminary attempt to do this with the help of analogies from more recent and well-documented primitive societies. The more glaring inconsistencies in the old theory are re-examined and Professor Renfrew shows convincingly how the baffling monuments of prehistoric Europe, like Stonehenge,…
I first read Richard Dawkins’ The Selfish Gene in 1980. It blew me away and precipitated my transformation from bee breeder into evolutionary geneticist. Later, I realised almost all evolutionary biologists of my generation were similarly drawn to their careers by Dawkins’ book. Why? People like Dawkins have the astonishing ability to transform complex theories into engaging narratives, to ferret out weird and wonderful examples from nature, and to exploit them for their explanatory power. My "best books" all have this in common. Big ideas about evolution and genetics illustrated by examples. I think they are the best kind of ‘pop science’ in that they are written for lay people, yet they inspire professionals.
This is probably the weirdest book I ever read. Certainly, the weirdest sciencey book.
It’s a dialogue between a palaeontologist and a novelist. The scientist, Arsuaga, sets up little excursions and events for Millás and himself around Madrid, and Millás writes about them. Each excursion illustrates some point about human evolution and behaviour.
As their relationship deepens, so do the tensions, as the scientist and the novelist don’t always see eye to eye. Arsuaga seems to delight in tormenting Millás by dragging him to places where he doesn’t initially get the point: pickup joints, childcare centres, and trains. They both love eating and drinking (so do I), and much of the discussion takes place over extended lunches. Sometimes, the food itself explains a point.
Prehistory is all around us. We just need to know where to look.
Juan Jose Millas has always felt like he doesn't quite fit into human society. Sometimes he wonders if he is even a Homo sapiens at all. Perhaps he is a Neanderthal who somehow survived? So he turns to Juan Luis Arsuaga, one of the world's leading palaeontologists and a super-smart sapiens, to explain why we are the way we are and where we come from.
Over the course of many months the two visit different places, many of them common…
William Ophuls served as a Foreign Service Officer in Washington, Abidjan, and Tokyo before receiving a PhD in political science from Yale University in 1973. His Ecology and the Politics of Scarcity published in 1977 laid bare the ecological, social, and political challenges confronting modern industrial civilization. It was honored by the Kammerer and Sprout awards. After teaching briefly at Northwestern University, he became an independent scholar and author. He has since published a number of works extending and deepening his original argument, most prominently Requiem for Modern Politics in 1997, Plato’s Revenge: Politics in the Age of Ecology in 2011, and Immoderate Greatness: Why Civilizations Fail in 2013.
Tainter makes a powerful and almost irrefutable case for complexity as the key to understanding both the rise and the fall of civilizations. In essence, complexity builds and builds until it is no longer manageable, so collapse ensues. That Tainter does not sufficiently appreciate the role that ecological limits, physical constraints, moral decline, and practical bungling can also play in the process does not detract from the power and utility of his argument. For these latter factors, see my own Immoderate Greatness.
Any explanation of political collapse carries lessons not just for the study of ancient societies, but for the members of all complex societies in both the present and future. Dr Tainter describes nearly two dozen cases of collapse and reviews more than 2000 years of explanations. He then develops a new and far-reaching theory that accounts for collapse among diverse kinds of societies, evaluating his model and clarifying the processes of disintegration by detailed studies of the Roman, Mayan and Chacoan collapses.
History has always fascinated me because it offered ways through which I could begin to make sense of the present. History is about how and why things change over time, above all about the causal dynamics underlying how societies, economies, and cultures work and transform. The history of Byzantium is a perfect example, offering many challenges of understanding and interpretation of its own, yet at the same time opening up a whole world of medieval societies and cultures around it, helping to illuminate not just the history of the immediate regions concerned – the eastern Mediterranean and Balkans – but of the world beyond.
“Collapse” is a term frequently bandied about in the press and popular as well as academic historical writing. Middleton’s book, well-informed by the palaeoenvironmental, archaeological, and documentary evidence shines a powerful light on some of the pervasive myths about supposed historical collapses, many of which were not at all what the term might suggest. He challenges us to think carefully and critically about what we really know about a past civilisation before we rush into easy judgements. His book made me rethink many of my own assumptions on the subject and undoubtedly influenced my own work.
Understanding Collapse explores the collapse of ancient civilisations, such as the Roman Empire, the Maya, and Easter Island. In this lively survey, Guy D. Middleton critically examines our ideas about collapse - how we explain it and how we have constructed potentially misleading myths around collapses - showing how and why collapse of societies was a much more complex phenomenon than is often admitted. Rather than positing a single explanatory model of collapse - economic, social, or environmental - Middleton gives full consideration to the overlooked resilience in communities of ancient peoples and the choices that they made. He offers…
Growing up in post-WWII Europe, young people’s anxiety was often channelled into searching for ‘lost worlds’, places hope could be nurtured and ancient solutions revived. So I encountered Atlantis and Lemuria and other imagined places but also learned, from training as a geologist, that once-populated lands had actually been submerged. Myths and legends often contain grains of observational truth at their heart. The more ‘submergence stories’ I research, from Australia through India and across northwest Europe, the more I realize how much we have forgotten about undersea human pasts. And how our navigation of the future could be improved by understanding them.
Sometimes English readers are never exposed to histories in other languages but I feel personally indebted to Sumathi Ramaswamy for this monumental scientific study of Tamil traditions about the ‘lost land’ of Kumari Kandam. It is not merely comprehensive but leads its reader through Tamil literature and poetry to express the profundity of loss associated with this land’s submergence. Which may conceivably have informed western stories about Lemuria in the Indian Ocean.
During the nineteenth century, Lemuria was imagined as a land that once bridged India and Africa but disappeared into the ocean millennia ago, much like Atlantis. A sustained meditation on a lost place from a lost time, this elegantly written book is the first to explore Lemuria's incarnations across cultures, from Victorian-era science to Euro-American occultism to colonial and postcolonial India. The Lost Land of Lemuria widens into a provocative exploration of the poetics and politics of loss to consider how this sentiment manifests itself in a fascination with vanished homelands, hidden civilizations, and forgotten peoples. More than a consideration…
I always want to be where I am not. This was why I read sci-fi and fantasy as a child. This was why I left the country of my birth and became a professional nomad. This is why I am spellbound by mountains I will never climb and oceans I will never dive into. Imagination can take you everywhere. It took me to the academy, where speculative literature became my scholarly field, and to the publishing world, where I am now getting ready for the launch of my eighth novel. When you are at home nowhere, you are at home everywhere–including on the summits of impossible mountains.
I am not frightened by Cthulhu, the tentacled monsters waiting in the depths of outer space or the ocean. I am mesmerized by them. Lovecraft, often labeled a horror writer, is one of the greatest literary fantasists. His imagination is boundless, and he is as adept at describing strange new environments as he is at evoking a sense of cosmic dread.
This classic novel combines Lovecraft’s signature monsters with an incredible dreamlike atmosphere that grips you and does not let you go. When you stand at the summit of the Mountains of Madness and glimpse what lies on the other side, you are torn between fear and fascination. For me, at least, fascination always wins.
At the Mountains of Madness is a science fiction-horror novella by American author H. P. Lovecraft.
An expedition to Antarctica goes horribly wrong as a group of explorers stumbles upon some mysterious ancient ruins, with devastating consequences. At the Mountains of Madness ranks among Lovecraft's most terrifying novellas, and is a firm favourite among fans of classic horror.
