The Cycle of Cosmic Catastrophes: How a Stone-Age Comet Changed the Course of World Culture: Flood, Fire, and Famine in the History of Civilization [Kindle Edition]

For a 400-page book, this book is most certainly worth it and I could not put it down. "The Cycle of Cosmic Catastrophes" is one of the most serious works that I have ever read, and it was written by scientists who proposed that we are going through "cycles" of cosmic events as it seemed to be related to the one event that happened over 12,000 years ago in North America lands. This is no speculation book, even though I brought it from "New Age/Speculation" section at my bookstore. I found this book to be quite scholarly and objective read with seriously hard evidences.

The one thing from this book that really interests me is the Carolina Bays. I lived around those areas for a long time, but never once have I noticed those bays until I read about it in this book. These shallow craters, as the authors pointed out, were impacts during the extinction event, which they gave evidences of them being craters, such as extraterrestrial materials. Very interesting!

This book is full of evidences and certainly opened my eyes to the fact that Earth is not, never was, safe from cosmic objects. This book is clear written and easy to read. I would highly recommend it.

Thinking that this book was going to be a heavy read I was in for a big surprise. It was like a scientific detective story that was so engaging that I read it in record time. Despite the easy reading for the layman the subject is thoroughly well researched by the 3 authors and presents a very compelling case for the proposition that the Northern Hemisphere was bombarded around 13000 years ago with catastrophic consequences. On top of meticulously detailing the many scientific finds by numerous researchers from various fields regarding the subject, the authors have interspersed stories from many native tribes and earlier civilizations that in this new light very likely are stories told by survivors of the cataclysm and passed down through oral traditions. It is hard at times not to feel a touch of the terror that our ancestors must have felt, when this happened, which historically speaking is not that long ago.

This book will without doubt cause a lot of stir in many places, and hopefully encourage more people to take an extra look and do more research. The book has definitely caused me to look at my home country with new eyes and with a keen interest to look out for signs in the countryside that confirms this theory. Like the book by Iman Wilkens "Where Troy once stood", this book has also been a great inspiration and catalyst to look at our history in a different way. And like the authors point out, the earth is currently in a very dangerous area of the galaxy where comets and other extraterrestrial objects are a lot more numerous than they have been for a long time.

This is a must read book that you will not regret having bought!

Sometimes you want to poke publishers in the eye. What we have here is a well-presented, exciting core thesis - that a cometary impact towards the end of the Ice Age devastated North America, wiped out the megafauna and destroyed the Clovis culture - plus several interesting but nevertheless speculative linked ideas. But the title and the cover latch on to some of the least convincing speculation and ignore the main subject. You could weep.

Why "The Cycle of..."? The whole point about the 13,000 BP event was that it was the stand-out event of the last 60,000 years. The authors mention some other people's suggestions that such events occur cyclically, but really only in passing. Indeed their own secondary thesis is that the Clovis event was itself triggered by a star in our corner of the galaxy going supernova about 30,000 years ago. What's cyclical about that?

And then the cover appears to be showing the destruction of a civilisation, presumably Atlantis - again a topic only mentioned in passing by the authors. Because, of course, the Atlantis story is about just that - the destruction of a civilisation. If it has any link to true events, then they can't predate the Neolithic.

The scientific detective story uncovering the Event itself is excellent and is why the book is "mostly" very good. There are one or two inconsistencies in their analysis of where exactly the impact or impacts took place, but I'll leave those for readers to spot. However, the links to the possible supernova are tenuous, the importance of the Toba eruption is glossed over, and the endless quoting of folk tales about fire and flood is irritating and maybe even irrelevant, for two reasons.

Firstly, as the authors point out, it appears that North America was essentially depopulated for a couple of millennia after the Event - there were no local survivors to pass on the story. And secondly, tree-ring studies show that there have been several pretty horrible climatic events, albeit not on the same scale as the Clovis event, much more recently. Mike Baillie (several of whose books I have reviewed on Amazon) has demonstrated likely cometary causes, with therefore associated fire and flood, for these events as well. It strikes me as more likely that the folk tales have more recent sources.

So - an important book. Read it, but read it for the right reasons.