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Title: Great work of alternative history fiction
Review: Were this marketed as alternative history, I'd give this four stars. But instead, it's asserted to be accurate. To write a complete debunking of every claim in the book would be longer than the book itself, and I'm simply more interested in other projects.Instead, I will merely use one example of a fundamental error: the Chinese character for 10,000.Menzies takes that to mean exactly that - 10,000. Unfortunately for his analysis, the Chinese used that character to also mean "a lot". Proof of this can be found in money from the era which included a gold figurine no larger than a redskin potato labeled "10,000 ounces".If he cannot bother to get a basic translation correct (as opposed to relying on transliteration) without bothering to question why China would have ships and fleets way out of proportion to what one would expect, what does it say about the rest of his analysis?
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