Description: They say that history is written by the victors. But what if history--or what we have come to know as history--has all along been written by the wrong people? What if everything we've been told is only part of the story? What if it's the wrong part?
In this groundbreaking new work, Mark Booth embarks on an enthralling intellectual tour of our world's secret histories. Starting from a dangerous premise--that everything we've been taught about our world's past is corrupted, and that the stories put forward by the various cults and mystery schools throughout history are true--Booth produces nothing short of an alternate history of the past 3,000 years. History is more than a list of things that have happened; it's a measure of consciousness and experience. And in The Secret History of the World, Booth's take on history is relentless, charging through time and space and thought in interdisciplinary fashion; embracing cognitive science, religion, psychology, historiography, and philosophy, a new timeline is drawn, and a huge swath of our cultural heritage that has long been hidden is restored. From Greek and Egyptian mythology to Jewish folklore, from Christian cults to Freemasons, from Charlemagne to Don Quixote, from George Washington to Hitler--Booth shows without a doubt that history as we know it needs a revolutionary rethink, and he has 3,000 years of hidden wisdom to back it up.Brief description: Mark Booth was educated at Oriel College, Oxford, where he studied philosophy and theology. He has worked in publishing for over twenty years and is currently in charge of Century, an imprint of Random House UK. The Secret History of the World is the outcome of a lifetime spent reading literature in this area, publishing many of the leading authors in the field, and hanging around antiquarian bookshops.
Review Quotes:
"An entire library's worth of scholarship [in] a single volume."
--San Francisco Gate "San Francisco Gate"