Meet Me in Atlantis: My Obsessive Quest to Find the Sunken City

Mark Adams (2015)
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THE A5 BOOK REVIEW

One of the many things that make people travel is the quest to discover, the irresistible and sometimes obsessive urge to explore and to find new worlds.  Perhaps the most popular and mystical undiscovered world is the legendary lost city of Atlantis.  The Greek philosopher Plato described Atlantis in detail, leaving geographical clues that have obsessed amateur explorers for centuries.  In Meet Me in Atlantis, Mark Adams decides to learn as much as he can about this sunken metropolis, traveling through Europe and Africa to meet the world’s leading experts and to evaluate the most likely potential locations for himself.  To be clear, this book is very much more of an in-depth summary of the research and debate around Atlantis than a travelogue, but his account of his academic journey is both intriguing and a little funny. 
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ABOUT MARK ADAMS

Mark Adams is a popular writer for many magazines and the author of several books including Mr. America, named by the Washington Post as a Best Book of 2009.  His first travel book, Turn Right at Machu PIcchu; Rediscovering the Lost City One Step at a Time, is a best-seller and is a top recommendation from us.  In his latest book Tip of the Iceberg, Adams retraces the 1899 expedition by railroad magnate Edward H. Harriman through the more remote regions of Alaska. 

GREAT QUOTES FROM MEET ME IN ATLANTIS

"What had seemed like a quickie writing assignment stretched into weeks of research as I struggled to get a grip on Plato’s engrossing but slippery ideas. One afternoon, while reading Julia Annas’s introductory survey Plato, I came across a sentence so striking that I had to reread it twice before its significance sank in: “In terms of sheer numbers of people affected, probably the most influential thing Plato ever wrote was his unfinished story of Atlantis.” In other words, the most impactful concept ever put forth by the most celebrated philosopher of all time was the famous tale of a lost civilization that sank beneath the waves."

INTERESTING LINKS:

  • Read a long excerpt from Meet Me in Atlantis​ by Mark Adams as published in the New York Times in 2015.
  • The first references to the lost city of Atlantis comes from two of Plato's last works.  The preamble to Timaeus first mentions the lost continent, and then the unfinished Critias includes an amazing description of the lost continent's ideal society, presumably created by the god-like children of Poseidon himself.  See more information on Atlantis as part of History.com.

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NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC ON ATLANTIS