The Book of Legendary Lands Author: Visit Amazon's Umberto Eco Page | Language: English | ISBN:
0847841219 | Format: EPUB
The Book of Legendary Lands Description
About the Author
Umberto Eco is a world-renowned writer of fiction, essays, and academic treatises. Among his best-selling novels are The Name of the Rose, Foucault’s Pendulum, and The Prague Cemetery.
- Hardcover: 432 pages
- Publisher: Rizzoli Ex Libris; First Edition edition (November 5, 2013)
- Language: English
- ISBN-10: 0847841219
- ISBN-13: 978-0847841219
- Product Dimensions: 9.6 x 7 x 1.3 inches
- Shipping Weight: 3.4 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
Umberto Eco managed to write a book which is fully equal to similar already existing works such as "The Atlas of Legendary Lands" or "Lost Lands, Forgotten Realms". Very convincing the selection of images: There are several we did not know, yet. From an aesthetic point of view a really beautiful book! And very convincing, too, the textual elaboration.
On the basis of Atlantis for example we see clearly that Umberto Eco did not just copy what others repeated already a thousand times. Rather did Umberto Eco find even in this controversial issue his own convincing path.
In detail on this example: For Eco, the history of the various Atlantis localizations is not - as so often - a menacing climax with National Socialism as culmination (wagging forefinger!). It is rather a journey through history with National Socialism as one stop of several. Olof Rudbeck, too, is no crackpot "baroque Nazi" for Eco but a serious baroque scholar, who just erred. Someone like Umberto Eco knows how to place these things properly, of course. In the video for the book the connection of Hyperborea (astonishingly not: Atlantis) to the Holocaust is drawn too closely: as if someone who reads and thinks about the ancient Hyperborea (resp. Atlantis) would become a National Socialist ... well, it is only the video, therefore let's forget it.
Let us leave the vexed and vain NS topic and come to Atlantis itself: Already in his "Foucault's Pendulum" Eco was pleasently reserved concerning Atlantis - this applies here, too. The Atlantis map of the baroque scholar Athanasius Kircher is called correctly a map of the "site" of Atlantis, not as a map which allegedly displays the exact shape of Atlantis.
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