Friday, April 2, 2010

Giants on the Rampage



What do English buses and books on giants have in common? Well, I'll tell you: you wait for ages for one to come along, then two arrive at once! Okay, it's an old joke, and not a particularly funny one either, but it serves its purpose!

Yesterday, I highlighted the news concerning the forthcoming release (by Anomalist Books) of True Giants: Myth, Legend, Folklore, and Fact, by Mark A. Hall and Loren Coleman.

Well, yet another book on the subject of Giants has just surfaced: The American Goliah, edited and published by Tim Beckley's Global Communications.

I have contributed a section to the book on the weird saga of the notorious Cardiff Giant (photographed below by me in January, at its current resting place: The Farmer's Museum in Cooperstown, NY).

The story of the hoaxed Giant is an entertainingly strange one; and one that - as you'll see from my section of the book - is getting even stranger...

3 comments:

Loren Coleman said...

Gigantic news!

Thank you.

I look forward, in the coming weeks, to sharing the cover for True Giants, which I know will look NOTHING like Tim's newest. :-)

Nick Redfern said...

Thanks Loren! Yes, please do keep me posted re TG and I'll give it good publicity here and do a review.

borky said...

Nick, I don't know why but all these 'giant' stories fascinate me and I suspect sooner or later a Flores 'man' version of one'll turn up, i.e., an exceedingly tall form of a 'Goliath' species much more recently extant than the current evolutional paradigm allows for, (homo redferniis sounds quite fetching...ye', ye', I know!).

I also suspect sooner or later someone, noticing how the whole notion of what's 'allowed' in the field's just expanded exponentially, 'll risk taking another look at the Piltdown Man fragments and maybe find their identification as a hoax was 'premature' - the thing about Piltdown was it was one of those thorns in the side of the evolutionary model back then, and everyone breathed a huge sigh of relief when someone very conveniently deconstructed it as a hoax.

The Cardiff Giant's one of those peculiar objects which seem straight forward at first sight, but become more mysterious the closer you look at them, (i.e., the maps which suddenly started popping up just when navigators like Columbus needed them), only for them to be subsequently discredited, before someone then notices they contain data they shouldn't - history's littered with the things, almost as if there's some 'opposing' secret organisations out there who 'gene splice' these things into the cultural landscape for reasons only guessable by noticing the long term power of their effects.

If you've got anything new on 'Cardiff' I look forward to reading it.

alanborky