Steve LeMaster Wrote:
-------------------------------------------------------

> Well, that's not so bad since the Sign and the
> Seal has many historical facts. The problem with
> it is the style of the writing.

That may be a problem (I too find Hancock to be a turgid read -- apart from Lords of Poverty which really was a very good book for its time), but a worse one is his penchant for mixing fact with speculation or sheer misrepresentation. The reader is gulled by the presence of easily verifiable (or already well-known) facts and the "other" stuff is slipped in. He misrepresents (usually by omission of key phrases) sources that he cites (e.g Sellers on "72" in the Osiris myth; Duncan Edlin did an article here about his misrepresentation of sources on Viracocha). Unless the reader assiduously verifies each citation (and they are legion!), he leaves himself open to being misled.

He also has the -- let's call it "idiosyncratic" -- approach of not correcting errors that are pointed out to him in the text where they occur, either by correction of the text iteself or by footnote (an option if he feels that his laboured prose is sacred and must be spared alteration). He prefers, it seems, to put any confession of error in the copious (over 40pp in the case of FoG) front matter of later editions; these corrections do not, IIRC, refer to the page on which the discovered errors occurred and, in at least one case (Vyse) do not even mention the name of the defamed party, making it a tad more tricky than would otherwise be necessary to ascertain exactly which bit of the regurgitated text is being corrected.

--

Stephen



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 10/02/2005 02:46AM by sftonkin.