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Title: Fiction from middle to end
Review: Menzies' "history" is to real history what alchemy is to science: fiction, but told in a compelling way to make gold from rubbish, and with enough truth at the beginning to lend credence to the rest (there's a good deal of real history at the start, but unreliably told). It's embarassing that so many people have been taken in. And shaming that Menzies - and his publisher - have made vast sums out of the public's gullibility.Do read Robert Finlay's review, "How Not to (Re)Write World History: Gavin Menzies and the Chinese Discovery of America", (Journal of World History, June 2004: it's available online) for a long and in-depth evaluation of this book and the author's methodology. There's also been a lot of discussion of the matter under the title of "Popular History and Bunkum" on the H-ASIA list on the academic H-Net site.
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