Finding Atlantis: A True Story of Genius, Madness, and an Extraordinary Quest for a Lost World

by David King

Hardcover, 2005

Status

Available

Call number

001.94

Genres

Publication

Harmony (2005), Hardcover

Description

The untold story of a Renaissance man on an adventurous hunt for a lost civilization-an epic quest through castles, courts, mythologies, and the spectacular world of the imagination. What do the gods of Mount Olympus have in common with the gods of Valhalla? What do these, in turn, have to do with the pharaohs of Egypt, and the glories of fabled Atlantis? In 1679, Olof Rudbeck stunned the world with the answer: they could all be traced to an ancient lost civilization that once thrived in the far north of Rudbeck's native Sweden. He would spend the last thirty years of his life hunting for the evidence. 300 years later, his story appears in English for the first time, a narrative of discovery as well as a cautionary tale about the dangerous dance of genius and madness.--From publisher description.… (more)

User reviews

LibraryThing member hailelib

A very interesting book about a fascinating man, Olof Rudbeck (1630 - 1702), who was a multi-talented Renaissance man. He was a lecturer in medicine, a botanist, a composer, and architect, and in the latter decades of his life he became involved in a quest to show that Atlantis was in fact ancient

Sweden. A prominent professor at Uppsala everything seemed to come easily to him and some of the most powerful people in Sweden were behind him. But he had a habit of taking on too much, leaving many projects half finished, and he had a positive talent for alienating his peers. Apparently university politics hasn't changed all that much and making enemies of other academics and spending freely on projects of which they disapprove was as good a way then as now of getting into hot water. A mix of biography, politics, mythology and madness that kept me reading.

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LibraryThing member JohnGrant1

I was astonished by how much I enjoyed this book, which I devoured in a single day. Olof Rudbeck was the discoverer of the lymph system, a keen astronomer, a composer, a singer, an instrumentalist, a top-flight architect -- in short, a sort of paradigm for Renaissance Man (the plant genus Rudbeckia

was named in honour of him and his son, another Olof) -- yet he devoted most of his life to an attempt to prove first that Sweden was the land of the Hyperboreans and then that Atlantis was in fact Swden, with its capital at Old Uppsala. What was disconcerting for me was that, if we ignore those of his claims that were obviously just products of a fevered overenthusiasm, he actually made a pretty good case for his thesis, one that was hailed by, inter alia, the Royal Society and Sir Isaac Newton. The real reason his monumental book (or books, because the expansions in later editions far surpassed in extent the original version) has been forgotten is that, shortly after his death, Sweden stumbled from being a major power to humiliation as a conquered, looted nation.

King's style is highly readable, on rare occasion verging, it has to be admitted, on the facile, and one or two interesting strands of background international politics seem to get forgotten before, chapters later, being rather summarily tied off; if I could give the book 4.8 or 4.9 stars rather than 5, I would. But overall? Highly recommended.

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LibraryThing member JBD1

By and large this is a straightforward biographical account of Olof Rudbeck, a Swedish academic, anatomist, and historian who worked for many years on a theory that Atlantis was located near Uppsala.

King's focal point is the Atlantean theory and the great (and sometimes very imaginative) lengths

to which Rudbeck went to find evidence for his theory. But Rudbeck's other work (on the human lymphatic system, botany, &c.) does not go unmentioned.

A good read, with some tantalizing elements about possible forgeries tossed in; those I certainly want to know more about!

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