Amazon.com (ISBN 0061379247, Mass Market Paperback)

One of the charms of Zecharia Sitchin is his tendency to take ancient writings as fact as opposed to myth. For example, according to clay tablets discovered by archeologists, Gilgamesh, a king of ancient Sumeria, was punished by the gods for raping female subjects on their wedding day--a particularly naughty, though not uncommon, pastime of ancient royalty. Snickering, the tricky gods created a double of him, which, as you can imagine, created havoc in the king's life. Some time later, directed by his goddess mother, Gilgamesh walked with his double to Lebanon to attain immortality. Sitchin ponders that perhaps the double had superhuman strength and en route built a second Stonehenge discovered in the Golan Heights by Israelis during the 1967 Six Days War. Hmmm. As Sitchin concedes, there's really no way to tell who actually built this hoary structure, but the in-depth archeological and historical research gathered here to support his musings concerning an extraterrestrial secret code to construct humankind is fascinating beyond belief. --P. Randall Cohan