A review by socraticgadfly
Atlas of a Lost World: Travels in Ice Age America by Sarah Gilman, Craig Childs
3.0
I was torn between 3 and 4 stars, and ultimately went with 3 as a reaction to a claim early in the editorial blurb:
No, Childs does no such thing. "Clovis-first" has LONG been dead, unless you're Rip Van Winkle. Stories about places like Monte Verde in Chile, affirming the findings, were being written 15 years before this book.
Otherwise, the book itself? It's a 4-star as a personal journal and things that go along with it. It's a 3-star, if that, as insightful about migrations from either Asia or Europe to the Americas. (And, the more I think about it, it might not hit that 3rd star fully. As a result, I did NOT put it on my "anthropology and archaeology" shelf, only my "travel" one.) It's also a bunch of magazine and journal articles stitched into a book, and even more than in some such cased, editing to "smooth the stitching together" is limited at best.
In Atlas of a Lost World, Craig Childs upends our notions of where these people came from and who they were. How they got here, persevered, and ultimately thrived is a story that resonates from the Pleistocene to our modern era.
No, Childs does no such thing. "Clovis-first" has LONG been dead, unless you're Rip Van Winkle. Stories about places like Monte Verde in Chile, affirming the findings, were being written 15 years before this book.
Otherwise, the book itself? It's a 4-star as a personal journal and things that go along with it. It's a 3-star, if that, as insightful about migrations from either Asia or Europe to the Americas. (And, the more I think about it, it might not hit that 3rd star fully. As a result, I did NOT put it on my "anthropology and archaeology" shelf, only my "travel" one.) It's also a bunch of magazine and journal articles stitched into a book, and even more than in some such cased, editing to "smooth the stitching together" is limited at best.