The Lost City of the Monkey God Audiobook By Douglas Preston cover art

The Lost City of the Monkey God

A True Story

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The Lost City of the Monkey God

By: Douglas Preston
Narrated by: Bill Mumy
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A 500-year-old legend. An ancient curse. A stunning medical mystery. And a pioneering journey into the unknown heart of the world's densest jungle.

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, best-selling 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 21st century.

PLEASE NOTE: When you purchase this title, the accompanying reference material will be available in your Library section along with the audio.

©2017 Douglas Preston (P)2017 Hachette Audio Americas Archaeology Central America Expeditions & Discoveries Indigenous Peoples United States World Thought-Provoking
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Fascinating Expedition Narrative • Rich Historical Context • Pleasant Voice • Immersive Adventure Story • Engaging Delivery

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A romantic notion...these lost cities, discoveries of ancient civilizations, and all the possibilities that hang on each little artifact that trickles out of obscurity...but Preston's tag-along accounting winds up a little anticlimactic. That's not to say that there isn't a lot of information here, but it winds around any actual discovery or headway to finding the White City aka the Lost City of the Monkey God, about as circuitous as the featured pictured of the Patuca River (see PDF, page 4--I'm talking lots of zigging and zagging, serpentine).

Preston takes 10 1/2 hours to give us all kinds of entomology and herpetology tidbits, historical offshoots of ancient civilizations, and details of setting up camp in the Honduran jungles, but nothing close to the kind of discovery deserving of popping open the champagne (maybe a beer). The technology of the *lidar* is interesting, and the photos (again, PDF) are a compelling argument for the existence of some kind of civilization that once existed in the T1 Valley. Ultimately, this is less an expedition than an accounting of all the hoops that must be jumped through, the governmental (and Native people's rights), the red tape, and snafus that accompany this kind of an undertaking; it's a tiny look at the dedication of patient explorers and dreamers.

I've read quite a few books of this kind, as probably anyone checking this out has also, and I was hoping for more. This is a middle dweller -- not as interesting as Lost City of Z, or River of Doubt, better than Jungleland (a book about a similar trip to find the Lost City of the Monkey God, written by Christopher Stewart). This one doesn't deliver on the promised *hair-raising adventure* as claimed in the summary, and though you may by the ending find yourself frustrated, I doubt you'll find this anywhere near *suspenseful* or especially *shocking*. For every foot of expedition, there are miles of paraphernalia. Whole chapters are devoted to a parasite (and the treatment) that plagued a few of the team members; this is followed by a strange cautionary exhortation to society by the author.

[*I couldn't help but think that this must have been where he got his info for his fiction novel: The Lost Island, published 2 yrs. later.]

I think I would have preferred the slide presentation, but other readers have given this high ratings so I suggest reading those glowing reviews.

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What did you love best about The Lost City of the Monkey God?

Great story, okay performance, but reader litters it with poor pronunication.

What did you like best about this story?

I liked its suspensefulness, its sense of discovery and treasure. The descriptions of dense tropical jungle with all its dangers are quite accurate, having spent some time in this kind of forest, myself.

How could the performance have been better?

The reader litters it with poor pronunication. How hard would it be to check with a native speaker of Spanish to make sure you have correct pronunciation, correct stress, etc?? So irritating. Too bad!!! I'm sure the author would have done a better job and been a better choice as reader.

Did you have an extreme reaction to this book? Did it make you laugh or cry?

Engrossing story.Irritating reader.

Any additional comments?

I very much appreciated the accompanying pdf that contained many great photos of the actual expedition.

Great story but reader not so good

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I guess I liked the other books much better. It was good, but not great.

Good, but mot great.

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Really enjoyed the book. Narrator Bill Mumy does a good job except he didn’t do his homework. Many words are pronounced incorrectly, which is distracting. My wife and I did lots of “eye rolling” at this miss. Too bad.

Liked the book

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The Lost City of the Monkey God chronicles the discovery of a fabulously important archeological site in the remote interior of Honduras, with a predictable array of personnel (the obsessed amateur, the uncompromising academic, the militaristic tough guy, the sketchy-as-hell fixer, etc.) and neotropical occurrences (days on end of buggy, muddy conditions, close calls with vipers, aftermath with tropical disease). The story is beautifully told, and even if it were just these predictable bits it would still have been a good listen. But Preston takes his narrative engagingly into unexpected territory. Naturally, he prefaced each part of the story with historical backdrops that inform the reader for enhanced appreciation of the events presented. By the end of the book one sees how these set-ups were developed so that they bear relevance to many parts of the narrative. For example, devastation by diseases introduced from the Old World is an obvious candidate to explain the city's sudden abandonment. Preston gives an eloquent account (frequently crediting his sources, as this is a story that has been told many times before) leading to a hypothesis in which one or more disease--possibly small pox--could have been introduced to the Mosquitia cities via trade with the Mayans, who would have been infected directly by Europeans. Later in describing their subsequent struggles with Leishmaniasis, Preston points out the irony (and certain justice) of how a New World disease nearly killed the team, largely descending from Old World bloodlines. He goes even further (maybe a bit too far) in attempting to piece together a genomic analysis-based hypothesis to suggest that the abandonment of the city coincided with a hybridization (introgression) event that gave rise to the isolate of Leishmania that afflicted the team. As an evolutionary biologist I thought that part was funny, but it also showed me how the cogs turn in Preston's brilliant mind, consistent with my overall view of this book.

The narrator (Mumy) is largely excellent though completely not believable as the "voice of the author." By "excellent" I mean that his voice is lovely and he speaks with the cadence of someone who is telling a story rather than reading a script. The problem I had was with his inconsistent pronunciation of technical/scientific words ("laysh" early and "leash" later) and his consistently awful pronunciation of Spanish--it was always like a caricature of a tourist applying American English phonemes to a syllable-by-syllable reading of Spanish words. No real gringo in Latin America could speak as badly.

Full-spectrum archeology, totally accessible

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