Lost Civilizations: A History of Vanished Empires and Forgotten Cultures

by Bill Price

Genres: History, Nonfiction

192 pages, Paperback

Published January 1, 2020

About the author

Bill Price is originally from Herefordshire and now lives in North West London. After working in various areas of the UK book trade for fifteen years, he become a full time freelance writer and is now the author of ten books. Most of these have reflected his interest in the history of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries and, in particular, the First World War.

Reviews

[Andrew McAuley · Rating 3 out of 5]

A decent enough book covering 35 lost civilizations from across the world. Each civilization gets about 4-6 pages of text, along with a few colour photographs, so it's a pretty superficial summary useful as a springboard for further reading.

The are no footnotes and although there is a section on further reading, no sources are directly given, making this book feel more like a coffee table book than a scholarly dive into antiquity.

It's all good enough and fairly light reading, but I felt the chapter at the end on mythical lost civilizations was mere padding and the book would've been better ended 20 pages earlier. I also felt slightly irritated that each chapter title was presented as a question which was basically 'what happened to X civilization?'

A decent enough book to flick through at leisure, but it wouldn't win any literary prizes.

[Maria Hdnsm · Rating 5 out of 5]

Really enjoyed this and how unbiased it was

[Astrid Gregovski · Rating 4 out of 5]

Neat. 👍