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Bob
03-22-2015, 11:26 PM
Suppose you heard of a book. And suppose the name is 1421.

Suppose the theme is about the Chinese.

If it is called fiction, you might wish to read it. Fiction for some is fun.

Hobbit for instance. A tale, but some find it fun.

1421 is fiction.

This review explains it.

http://www.amazon.com/1421-Year-China-Discovered-America/dp/0061564893/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1427081853&sr=1-1&keywords=1421


Gavin Menzies is a charming, seductive, inventive story teller, but his book is just an elaborate literary hoax, and belongs on the fiction list.
Gavin claims he has real, tangible evidence. Not true. Just check out for yourself some of the sources he cites. His own sources do not support the claims he makes.
For example, at pp 201-2(hardcover) Gavin writes of a pulley "for hoisting sails" found on the beach at Neahkahnie, Oregon, about 60 miles south of me. I drove down there and spoke with the curator of the Tillamook County Pioneer Museum. He had talked with Gavin in 2002 and Wayne told Gavin the pulley had already been carbon dated (in 1993) to 1590; and, the wax was beeswax for candles, prized and common cargo for the Spanish trade galleons that traveled between the Philippines and the west coast of North America, on a regular basis, between 1564 and 1815. The pulley was from one of those Manila galleons. In his book (page520) Gavin lists as a source "Tales of the Neahkahnie Treasure", prepared by the Nehalem Valley Historical Society Treasure Committee, 1991, published by the Tillamook County Pioneer Museum. It clearly states (p5) the beeswax, not as Gavin states "paraffin wax" a hydrocarbon product, had been carbon dated to 1681. Further, a pollen study of the beeswax had revealed its source was northern Luzon in the Philippines where there was a certain variety of shrub the bees visited for pollen.
Gavin ignores the inconvenient facts, hides them from the reader, and writes as if he is just waiting for the lab to confirm the finding of some possible real Chinese evidence. It's not possible, as Gavin well knows, the lab work has long since been done and it does not fit his time frame.
For another example consider the Bimini road story.Read more › (http://www.amazon.com/1421-Year-China-Discovered-America/product-reviews/0061564893/ref=cm_cr_dp_text?ie=UTF8&showViewpoints=0&sortBy=byRankDescending#R30AK5OOWC9FZ8)

southwest88
03-22-2015, 11:40 PM
Yah, I haven't read Menzies' work - but I have read Tolkien. Tolkien spent a lot of time & effort on the background of his work - invented languages, alphabets, songs, poems, histories, sagas, lineages - & I think he kept notes to make sure everything meshed properly. This was for trolls, orcs, elves, men, dwarves, wizards, eagles, Ents & on & on. He was nearly the death of his publishers - he was forever rewriting, improving or expanding stories well up to the drop dead date for submitting changes.

His publishers, I believe, finally learned to cut him off @ a given point - & simply printed what they had of him @ that date. The only real problem I have with Tolkien is that he makes it look easy. Much like the flood of bad & v. bad SF that followed on the commercial success of Star Wars, there are a lot of people who seem to think that writing fantasy is easy - they don't see the endless play/study/work that Tolkien invested in his stories - probably more because he loved the actualization of his ideas & concepts into concrete, written form than anything else. But he had the linguistic knowledge & background, & the work ethic & discipline to bring it off.

Green Arrow
03-23-2015, 12:11 AM
Actually, the technical term for it is "pseudo-history." It straddles the line between fact and fiction. It's a book of historical theories, nothing more.

Bob
03-23-2015, 12:26 AM
Actually, the technical term for it is "pseudo-history." It straddles the line between fact and fiction. It's a book of historical theories, nothing more.

I have some of those.

One I have here is about what ifs. What if a historical person did this rather than that. What would it change in history.

Fun fiction.

As The review points out, it is fiction. The author simply made things up.

Green Arrow
03-23-2015, 12:36 AM
I have some of those.

One I have here is about what ifs. What if a historical person did this rather than that. What would it change in history.

Fun fiction.

As The review points out, it is fiction. The author simply made things up.

What he did was take evidence and draw a conclusion from it. His conclusion was mostly conjecture, but to say he "made things up" is overly simplistic. You should read the book rather than just taking some random Amazon reviewer's word for it.

Bob
03-23-2015, 12:37 AM
What he did was take evidence and draw a conclusion from it. His conclusion was mostly conjecture, but to say he "made things up" is overly simplistic. You should read the book rather than just taking some random Amazon reviewer's word for it.

Or taking your word for it. Fair or not????

Green Arrow
03-23-2015, 12:38 AM
Or taking your word for it. Fair or not????

I don't want you to take my word for it. I want you to read the book before you judge it.

Bob
03-23-2015, 12:41 AM
I don't want you to take my word for it. I want you to read the book before you judge it.

Good, since it is my money and I prefer facts, it goes way down on my list of must reads.

Green Arrow
03-23-2015, 12:53 AM
Good, since it is my money and I prefer facts, it goes way down on my list of must reads.

Then it should also go way down on your list of things to talk about.

Bob
03-23-2015, 12:58 AM
Then it should also go way down on your list of things to talk about.

Should it? Really, should it? I don't tell you what to talk about or read. But I believe in freedom.

Green Arrow
03-23-2015, 01:20 AM
Should it? Really, should it? I don't tell you what to talk about or read. But I believe in freedom.

I don't tell you what to do, Bob. I merely advise. It may be your habit to discuss things you have no knowledge of, but I prefer to become knowledgeable about a thing before I discuss it.

Bob
03-23-2015, 01:12 PM
I don't tell you what to do, Bob. I merely advise. It may be your habit to discuss things you have no knowledge of, but I prefer to become knowledgeable about a thing before I discuss it.

My point is the book is fiction. And you agreed. /this topic

Bob
03-23-2015, 01:53 PM
To be fair, let's try to find a review of 1421 that favors the book.

1.
A terrible book on an interesting topic (http://www.amazon.com/review/ROJFFM37YHMTI/ref=cm_cr_dp_title?ie=UTF8&ASIN=0061564893&nodeID=283155&store=books)
By William J. Poser (http://www.amazon.com/gp/pdp/profile/AJTD3GFTL3XUV/ref=cm_cr_dp_pdp) on July 5, 2006
Format: HardcoverThe subject of this book, the Chinese exploratory voyages of the early 15th century, is an interesting one, and questions remain as to exactly how far they got and what they did. Unfortunately, there is little factual information in this book that is not to be found in other sources, and the novel claims are poorly substantiated. All too often, the "facts" cited are wrong, the nature of the argument Menzies means to make is unclear, or the evidence that he claims to exist is not actually produced. Let me illustrate from some of Menzies linguistic arguments. He claims that the Squamish language (which he mistakenly locates on Vancouver Island rather than on the coast of the mainland of British Columbia) contains no less than forty words that are identical with Chinese words. He does not cite any of the Squamish words and cites only three Chinese words. Not one of the three alleged Chinese words actually occurs in Chinese. At another point, he cites the fact that there is a village in Peru whose people speak Chinese. Aside from the questionable source of this claim, even if true, what would it prove? To constitute evidence that the Chinese had visited Peru prior to Columbus, he would have to show that the people in this village had spoken Chinese hundreds of years ago. He does not even assert this, much less provide evidence of it.

Menzies' own account of his research techniques leaves one gasping with incredulity at his incompetence. He claims to have inspected a stone inscription in the Cape Verde Islands in a language unknown to him. Thinking that it might be from India, he sends a photograph of it to the Bank of India. The Bank responds that the inscription is in Malayalam.Read more › (http://www.amazon.com/1421-Year-China-Discovered-America/product-reviews/0061564893/ref=cm_cr_dp_text?ie=UTF8&showViewpoints=0&sortBy=byRankDescending#ROJFFM37YHMTI)

2.


I was not expecting to believe all the claims in this book, though I was intrigued by the possibility of unexpected new findings about the age of exploration. The Europeans were clearly not the first to sail great distances and discover new lands. You would have once been dismissed as a crackpot for claiming that the Vikings reached the Americas 500 years before Columbus, but that's now accepted history. There's also plenty of proof that the Chinese were regularly sailing to the Middle East and East Africa centuries before Europeans could even leave their own shores. But this book, claiming that the Chinese momentously and influentially circumnavigated the globe in 1421-1423, is a disaster of hyperbolic claims and selective interpretation of historical evidence. That's because Gavin Menzies started with an idea, compiled evidence that seemed to point in the right direction, and convinced himself that he was finding mindboggling breakthroughs. But there is little reason for us to be as convinced as he is.

You can see plenty of other reviews (here and elsewhere) debunking the many, many research errors committed by Menzies. Most of these criticisms are more believable to me than Menzies' assertions. On a higher level I'll add that Menzies is an unabashed member of the "incredible coincidence" school of history. In just a couple of examples, among multitudes, he claims that the presence of Asiatic birds in South America means "the conclusion is inescapable" of visiting Chinese sailors; or an ice-free depiction of Antarctica on a map "confirm[s]" that the Chinese were there during a January. Menzies also unquestioningly accepts Chinese court histories as accurate, without considering the possibility that they may be distorted by embellishments or state propaganda.Read more › (http://www.amazon.com/1421-Year-China-Discovered-America/product-reviews/0061564893/ref=cm_cr_dp_text?ie=UTF8&showViewpoints=0&sortBy=byRankDescending#R3DYWK4DKY3W3E)

3.
Gavin Menzies' "1421: The Year China Discovered America" presents a fascinating premise: in the year 1421 a huge armada set forth from China to explore the oceans of the world, visiting not only India and East Africa, already known to the Chinese from previous expeditions, but also West Africa, the American continents, Australia, and even Antarctica decades or centuries before European explorers reached those same shores. But when the survivors of this great endeavor returned to China a profound change at the highest levels of the government had taken place, a change that ruptured contact with the outside world. China withdrew within itself, destroyed the records of the expedition, and the great adventure was forgotten.

That one including all of the review is very favorable.

But it proves the person accepts fiction.

In his review he brings up when the Chinese .... allegedly that is, got home. They found a new government. The Government hated the voyage so they plain blotted it out of their own history.

Very dumb premise. Very very dumb.

I think good fiction is fine. But to act as if this actually happened pulling in fake evidence, well, just fiction.