Mixed views on author's theory

HIS book, 1421: The Year China Discovered America, may be selling briskly in the United States, but his extraordinary theory that Chinese explorers reached the New World decades before Christopher Columbus is proving a tougher sell to academics – even here in China.  

“Nonsense,” declares China’s Zheng He Association, which celebrates the exploits of Zheng He, the very explorer Gavin Menzies says directed ships around the globe a century before Ferdinand Magellan.