The Lost City of the Monkey God: A True Story

by Douglas Preston

Overview

The #1 New York Times and Wall Street Journal bestseller, named one of the best books of the year by The Boston Globe and National Geographic: acclaimed journalist Douglas Preston takes readers on a true adventure deep into the Honduran rainforest in this riveting narrative about the discovery of a lost civilization — culminating in a stunning medical mystery.



Since the days of conquistador Hernán Cortés, rumors have circulated about a lost city of immense wealth hidden somewhere in the Honduran interior, called the White City or the Lost City of the Monkey God. Indigenous tribes speak of ancestors who fled there to escape the Spanish invaders, and they warn that anyone who enters this sacred city will fall ill and die. In 1940, swashbuckling journalist Theodore Morde returned from the rainforest with hundreds of artifacts and an electrifying story of having found the Lost City of the Monkey God-but then committed suicide without revealing its location.


Three quarters of a century later, bestselling author Doug Preston joined a team of scientists on a groundbreaking new quest. In 2012 he climbed aboard a rickety, single-engine plane carrying the machine that would change everything: lidar, a highly advanced, classified technology that could map the terrain under the densest rainforest canopy. In an unexplored valley ringed by steep mountains, that flight revealed the unmistakable image of a sprawling metropolis, tantalizing evidence of not just an undiscovered city but an enigmatic, lost civilization.


Venturing into this raw, treacherous, but breathtakingly beautiful wilderness to confirm the discovery, Preston and the team battled torrential rains, quickmud, disease-carrying insects, jaguars, and deadly snakes. But it wasn't until they returned that tragedy struck: Preston and others found they had contracted in the ruins a horrifying, sometimes lethal-and incurable-disease.


Suspenseful and shocking, filled with colorful history, hair-raising adventure, and dramatic twists of fortune, THE LOST CITY OF THE MONKEY GOD is the absolutely true, eyewitness account of one of the great discoveries of the twenty-first century.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781455540013
Publisher:	Grand Central Publishing
Publication date:	09/05/2017
Edition description:	Reprint
Pages:	336
Sales rank:	55,431
Product dimensions:	5.20(w) x 7.90(h) x 1.00(d)

About the Author

DOUGLAS PRESTON worked as a writer and editor for the American Museum of Natural History and taught writing at Princeton University. He has written for The New Yorker, Natural History, National Geographic, Harper's, Smithsonian, and The Atlantic. The author of several acclaimed nonfiction books—including the bestseller The Monster of Florence—Preston is also the co-author with Lincoln Child of the bestselling series of novels featuring FBI agent Pendergast.

Place of Birth:

Cambridge, Massachusetts

Education:

B.A., Pomona College, 1978

Website:

http://www.prestonchild.com

Table of Contents

1 The Gates of Hell 1

2 Somewhere in the Americas 7

3 The Devil Had Killed Him 11

4 A Land of Cruel Jungles 20

5 One of the Few Remaining Mysteries 26

6 The Heart of Darkness 39

7 The Fish That Swallowed the Whale 52

8 Lasers in the Jungle 60

9 Something That Nobody Had Done 65

10 The Most Dangerous Place on the Planet 74

11 Uncharted Territory 88

12 No Coincidences 105

13 Fer-de-Lance 113

14 Don't Pick the Flowers 124

15 Human Hands 139

16 I'm Going Down 148

17 A Bewitchment Place 160

18 Quagmire 170

19 Controversy 182

20 The Cave of the Glowing Skulls 194

21 The Symbol of Death 211

22 They Came to Wither the Flowers 219

23 White Leprosy 233

24 The National Institutes of Health 249

25 An Isolated Species 259

26 La Ciudad del Jaguar 271

27 We Became Orphans 289

Acknowledgments 303

Sources and Bibliography 305

Index 319

About the Author 327

Editorial Reviews

Memoirs of jungle adventures too often devolve into lurid catalogs of hardships, as their authors take undue glee in detailing every bug bite, malarial fever and bad cup of instant coffee they've had to endure. But Preston proves too thoughtful an observer and too skilled a storyteller to settle for churning out danger porn. He has instead created something nuanced and sublime: a warm and geeky paean to the revelatory power of archaeology, tempered by notes of regret.

The New York Times Book Review - Brendan I. Koerner

★ 01/16/2017
Novelist Preston’s irresistibly gripping account of his experiences as part of the expedition to locate an ancient city in the Honduran mountains reads like a fairy tale minus the myth. “There was once a great city in the mountains,” he writes, “struck down by a series of catastrophes, after which the people decided the gods were angry and left, leaving their possessions. Thereafter it was shunned as a cursed place, forbidden, visiting death on those who dared enter.” In 2012, Preston was present as the expedition team attempted to use light detection and ranging technology to identify the city’s location in the uncharted wildernesses of Honduras; they “ billions of laser beams into a jungle that no human beings had entered for perhaps five hundred years.” The effort succeeded in locating two large sites, apparently built by the civilization that once inhabited the Mosquiteria region. The discovery led to a return trip in 2015 to explore the sites on foot, a physically and emotionally draining experience that resulted in remarkable archeological finds, specifically a cache of stone sculptures. Preston, author of The Monster of Florence and co-author with Lincoln Child of the bestselling thriller series featuring FBI agent Pendergast, brings readers into the field while enriching the narrative with historical context, beginning with 16th-century rumors of the city’s existence reported by explorer Hernán Cortés after his conquest of Mexico. Along the way, Preston explains the legendary abandonment of the City of the Monkey God and provides scientific reasoning behind its reputation as life-threatening. Admirers of David Grann’s The Lost City of Z will find their thirst for armchair jungle adventuring quenched here. (Jan.)

Publishers Weekly

NAMED A NEW YORK TIMES NOTABLE BOOK OF 2017

#1 New York Times and #1 Wall Street Journal bestseller!



A Best Book of 2017 from the Boston Globe



One of the 12 Best Books of the Year fromNational Geographic



Included in Lithub's Ultimate Best Books of 2017 List



A Favorite Science Book of 2017 from Science News

From the Publisher

What could be more tantalizing to archaeologists, scientists, and adventurers than rumors of a fabled White City, the Lost City of the Monkey God, somewhere deep in the jungles of Honduras? Narrator Bill Mumy gives voice to bestselling author Douglas Preston’s true-life chronicle of his expedition into one of the most dangerous, inhospitable places on the planet. Mumy keeps the listening intense as Preston details earlier, mostly failed, ventures to find Ciudad Blanca. However, when a cutting-edge technology that can map under the densest rainforest canopy revealed a sprawling metropolis, possibly a lost civilization, Preston and a group of scientist mounted another expedition. Mumy is animated delivering the team’s treks through soaking downpours, thigh-high mud, and encounters with deadly venom-spitting vipers and flesh-eating parasites. Exciting listening. S.J.H. © AudioFile 2017, Portland, Maine

FEBRUARY 2017 - AudioFile

★ 2016-10-20
"Once again I had the strong feeling, when flying into the valley, that I was leaving the twenty-first century entirely": another perilous Preston (The Kraken Project, 2014, etc.) prestidigitation.The noted novelist and explorer is well-known for two things: going out and doing things that would get most people killed and turning up ways to get killed that might not have occurred to readers beforehand but will certainly be on their minds afterward. Here, the adventure involves finding a lost civilization in the heart of the Honduran rain forest, a steaming-jungle sort of place called La Mosquitia that saw the last gasps of a culture related, by ideas if not blood, to the classic Maya. That connection makes archaeological hearts go pitter-patter, and it sets archaeological blood to boiling when well-funded nonarchaeologists go in search of suchlike things, armed with advanced GPS and other technological advantages. Preston, who blends easily with all camps, braves the bad feelings of the professionals to chart out a well-told, easily digested history of the region, a place sacred to and overrun by jaguars, spider monkeys, and various other deities and tutelary spirits. Finding the great capital known, in the neutral parlance of the scholars, as T1 puts Preston and company square in various cross hairs, not least of them those of the Honduran army, whose soldiers, he divines, are on hand not to protect the place from looters but to do some looting themselves. "I've seen this kind of corruption all over the world," says one member of the expedition, "believe me, that's what's going to happen." Yes, but more than that—and the snakes and spiders and vengeful spirits—there's the specter of a spectacularly awful, incurable disease called leishmaniasis, on the introduction of which Preston goes all Hot Zone and moves from intrepid explorer to alarmed epidemiologist. A story that moves from thrilling to sobering, fascinating to downright scary—trademark Preston, in other words, and another winner.

Kirkus Reviews