Velikovsky wrote this book as a result of research he made to account for the upheaval of many civilizations around 1400 BC, especially in the middle east. That 20 year research resulted in W in C wherein he claims that the source of upheaval was the near miss between the earth and a comet, captured by our solar system as the planet Venus almost 600 years later. He arrived at these conclusions by creating an hypothesis large enough to account for the observations of the ancients, not their explanations. Part of this hypothesis required planets to be charged bodies, later proven to be true, and that Venus' rotation is opposite that of the earth and other planets in our solar system, also true. The book is meticulously researched with writings from most of the ancient texts around the world. It is a tour de force that disrupted the scientific world in 1950 and that created the Velikovsky Affair as 'scientists' fought his claims. He was eventually vindicated by the Venus satelite fly-by after which he was invited to speak to NASA scientists. Velikovsky was a very rare 'out of the box' thinker!