REVIEWED BY JASON COLAVITO
St. Martin’s Press, New York, 2019. 608 pp. $29.99 ISBN 13: 978-1250153739
IN 1552, THE HISTORIAN FRANCISCO López de Gómara became one of the first to suggest that the American continents were in fact Atlantis. America was, he said, greater than Africa and Asia combined, and the peoples of Mexico even called water “atl,” the very name of Atlantis, in memory of the sunken capital of ancient times. Nearly five centuries later, the new book America Before opens with its author, Graham Hancock, telling readers that after decades of ignoring the “obvious clue” of Atlantis because of the stigma attached to such research, he had come to believe that the lost continent “does sound a lot like America.”