The Lost City of the Monkey God: A True Story

by Douglas Preston, Bill Mumy (Read by)

Overview

Includes a PDF of supplemental materials.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781478988229
Publisher:	Hachette Audio
Publication date:	09/05/2017
Edition description:	Unabridged
Product dimensions:	5.30(w) x 5.80(h) x 1.50(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

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

★ 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