Book Review: Treasures of the Lost Races by Rene Noorbergen

Treasures of the Lost Races by Rene Noorbergen
My rating: 1 of 5 stars

Buried treasure whether coins or artifacts made of gold—though silver isn’t bad either—are being found by archaeologists and normal everyday people is an allure for more to go out to be the one to have the next big find. Treasures of the Lost Races by Rene Noorbergen chronicles some of the amazing discoveries of treasures found around the world, searches for lost treasures, and theories about how advanced artefacts were from “primitive” cultures.

While a good portion of Noorbergen’s writing is about amazing treasures found over the years and were interesting, another large portion was about the search for various treasures which is where some of the major problems with the book were located. While Noorbergen’s discussion on the Copper Scroll treasure list from either Solomon’s Temple or the Second Temple was fine as was his search for the remains of Pharaoh’s army of the Exodus, it was the Ark of the Covenant and lost Incan treasure were things got mindboggling. In the former, Noorbergen focuses on a story of a US Army chaplain who supposedly glimpsed the Ark while his unit was chasing German soldiers in Palestine after their retreat from Egypt which absolutely makes no historical sense; in the later Noorbergen goes off on underground tunnels in the Andes that the Inca might has used to stash gold from the Spaniards and goes off on a tangent from his previous book. At a length of 174 pages, one wonders if Noorbergen was just padding the book though it resulted in it being disjointed.

Treasures of the Lost Races had its interesting sections, but Rene Noorbergen wrote a book that was disjointed and in some places completely inaccurate making it not a very good follow up to Secrets of the Lost Races.

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