Ellis's books deals with many aspects of the Atlantis phenomenon - Plato's motives in telling the story, more-or-less reasonable attempts to identify a real Atlantis, its use in modern fiction and mysticism - but concentrates on the idea that the story represents a distorted memory of the end of Minoan Crete and/or the catastrophic eruption of Thera (Santorini), which may or may not have been a factor in the former. Ellis himself, it should be noted, doesn't believe in this idea, but thinks that Plato wanted to spin a story with a moral, not report ancient history or retell a legend.

This could have been a great book, but it's marred by two significant problems. First, there are too many repetitions, the same events and ideas being recounted repeatedly, from slightly different points of view. One might think this the result of editing together a number of originally separate essays or articles, but according to what Ellis says in the forword about the book's origin that doesn't seem to apply. Whatever the reason, it's annoying and sloppy.

Second, and worse, Ellis is also careless about facts, the book being littered by little errors, some just sloppy, like claiming that 1500 BC is about twenty-five centuries ago, some seemingly from careless reading of sources, like mixing up AD and BC dates. Sometimes he doesn't seem to have quite understood his sources, like in a brief discussion of language where he implies that Greek was succeeded by "Cretan" - does he confuse the temporal order of Greek and the undeciphered language of the Linear A inscriptions, or did he misunderstand the replacement of Mycenaean Greek of the Linear B inscriptions by the Doric dialects of classical Crete to involve a non-Greek incoming "Cretan" language? Most of the errors I noticed concerns issues outside Ellis's own speciality of marine biology, but at one point he confuses the Sirenia and the Sirenidae; presumably he knows better than that, but again, was careless, and evidently the publisher didn't have a competent fact checker either.

It is a very interesting topic, and a well researched book, but the chapters seem like they must be previously published elsewhere and thrown together here without much careful editing, there are instances where one chapter repeats a big chunk of another. But I liked it in general ( )