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The Lost City of the Monkey God Kindle Edition
Douglas Preston (Author) Find all the books, read about the author, and more. See search results for this author |
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Since the days of conquistador Hernán Cortés, rumours have circulated about a lost city of immense wealth hidden deep in the Honduran interior. Indigenous tribes speak of ancestors who fled there to escape the Spanish invaders, and warn the legendary city is cursed: to enter it is a death sentence. They call it the Lost City of the Monkey God. In 1940, swashbuckling journalist Theodore Morde returned from the rainforest with hundreds of artefacts and an electrifying story of having found the City – 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 single-engine plane carrying 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 a lost civilization.
To confirm the discovery, Preston and the team battled torrential rains, quickmud, plagues of insects, jaguars, and deadly snakes. They emerged from the jungle with proof of the legend... and the curse. They had contracted a horrifying, incurable and sometimes lethal disease.
Suspenseful and shocking, filled with history, 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.
- LanguageEnglish
- PublisherHead of Zeus
- Publication date12 January 2017
- File size36527 KB
Product description
Review
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
One of Shelf Awareness's Best Books of the Year--Shelf Awareness
One of Publishers Weekly's Best Books of 2017 in Fiction!--Publishers Weekly
The Lost City of the Monkey God is a throwback to the golden age of adventure archaeology, the thrilling true story of a group of explorers penetrating one of the toughest jungles on earth in search of a lost city...and finding it. Preston is a terrific writer of both non-fiction books and bestselling novels, and makes you feel the dark heart of this lost Honduran wilderness.--John Sandford, Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist and author of the #1 New York Times bestselling Prey series of novels
A captivating real-life adventure tale... Preston deftly explains the science behind this work and makes it exciting.--Science News
A great true adventure, filled with danger, close calls, better-than-Hollywood characters, and a lost world that reaches through time and into everyone's future. One of the best nonfiction books I've read.--Robert Kurson, New York Times bestselling author of Shadow Divers and Pirate Hunters
A story that moves from thrilling to sobering, fascinating to downright scary--trademark Preston, in other words, and another winner.--Kirkus, starred review
A swift and often hair-raising account... Preston pushes The Lost City of the Monkey God well beyond the standard adventure narrative.--The Chicago Tribune
A well-documented and engaging read...The author's narrative is rife with jungle derring-do and the myriad dangers of the chase.--USA Today
Admirers of David Grann's The Lost City of Z will find their thirst for armchair jungle adventuring quenched here... Irresistibly gripping.--Publishers Weekly, starred review
Be prepared to turn the pages furiously as the heart of every adventurer is opened wide by the thrilling journey outlined in THE LOST CITY OF THE MONKEY GOD.--The Bookreporter
Best-selling journalist and thriller author Douglas Preston stars in his own true-story page-turner about the discovery of a lost city deep in the Honduran jungle...giving readers an Indiana Jones style adventure that's history, not Hollywood.--Virtuoso Life
Breezy, colloquial and sometimes very funny...A very entertaining book.--The Wall Street Journal
Deadly snakes, flesh-eating parasites, and some of the most forbidding jungle terrain on earth were not enough to deter Douglas Preston from a great story.--The Boston Globe
Douglas Preston is one of the most adventurous figures in American letters today. Inured to personal danger, braving venomous snakes and lethal pathogens, he somehow gets it all--the science, the history, the intrigues, the obsessive characters, the electric moment of discovery, and the haunted cries of a once-powerful civilization. Preston's marvelous story is made all the more potent by the astonishing fact that, from beginning to end, it happens to be true.--Hampton Sides, New York Times bestselling author of In the Kingdom of Ice
Douglas Preston, at great risk to his own life, has produced a thrilling and powerful adventure story. Not only does he leave the reader fitfully turning the pages, he sheds an important light on what the Americas looked like before the arrival of Christopher Columbus and on the fragility of our own civilization.--David Grann, New York Times bestselling author of The Lost City of Z
For anyone who dreams of lost times and places--and who doesn't?--this is the book. Revelatory, chilling, creepy, and alive with deadly snakes and insects bearing incurable disease, it's high adventure at its best, and all true.--Erik Larson, New York Times bestselling author of Dead Wake and The Devil in the White City
If you're going to explore a lost city-in this case one that vultures, poisonous snakes, sand flies, and mudholes have protected for 500 years-you really only want to do it with Douglas Preston. A tale of bravado, chicanery, and impossible dreams, arresting at every turn, no less so in its unexpected, pulse-racing coda.--Stacy Schiff, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of The Witches: Salem, 1692, and Cleopatra: A Life
Included in The Texas Library Association's Texas Topaz Nonfiction Reading List for 2017--TLA
Let author Douglas Preston give testimony to the old adage: Truth is stranger than fiction...The Lost City of the Monkey God is more than just an adventure story. It examines such modern issues as the ethics of archeological expeditions, man's destruction of the rainforest and the incessant creep of technology and its effects on indigenous peoples. Readers will find themselves both shocked and captivated by this account of mysteries old and new.--Bookpage
One of the best reads so far this year.--The Sacramento Bee
Packed with the power of realism and history unfolding.--The Star Ledger
Preston builds a compelling case for the scientific significance of what the expedition unearthed....The year may still be young, but I would wager a small fortune that Douglas Preston has already written the best snake-decapitation scene of 2017....The book's most affecting moments [center] on the otherworldly nature of the jungle itself....Memoirs of jungle adventures too often devolve into lurid catalogs of hardships [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....Few other writers possess such heartfelt appreciation for the ways in which artifacts can yield the stories of who we are.--The New York Times Book Review
Replete with informative archaeology lessons and colorful anecdotes about the challenges Elkins' crew faced during the expedition, including torrential rains and encounters with deadly snakes, Preston's uncommon travelogue is as captivating as any of his more fanciful fictional thrillers.--Booklist
The Lost City of the Monkey God is a superior example of narrative nonfiction, an exciting, immersive tale of modern science and ancient mythology. Preston captures the complexity of his subject without bogging down in the details, presenting scenes with clarity, purposefulness and wit. It's a great story for a snowy day, an action-packed journey into a hot zone of scientific intrigue.--The Portland Press Herald
This modern-day archeological adventure and medical mystery reads as rapidly as a well-paced novel, but is a heart-pounding true story.--Shelf Awareness, Starred Review
This nonfiction thriller about plunging into the interior of the Honduran jungle is actually true and a perfect read for armchair travelers or would-be adventurers who bemoan the fact that there's nothing left to discover...Douglas Preston's true-life tale includes everything from the latest technology to ancient curses to scientific backbiting and a mysterious illness that came out of the jungle and is headed your way.--The Huffington Post
What reader could resist a new book by Douglas Preston called THE LOST CITY OF THE MONKEY GOD? Not this reader. Preston's book offers rewards for both the mystery fan and the nonfiction aficionado. THE LOST CITY is addictive-fast-paced and riveting, but it's also important. We mustn't repeat the cataclysmic mistakes of the past. Ironically-as THE LOST CITY illustrates-that's exactly what our short-sighted civilization is doing right now.--James Patterson
About the Author
Book Description
A five-hundred-year-old legend. An ancient curse. A medical mystery. A journey into the unknown heart of the world's densest jungle and a stunning archaeological discovery.
--This text refers to an alternate kindle_edition edition.Product details
- ASIN : B01NCJHGDW
- Publisher : Head of Zeus (12 January 2017)
- Language : English
- File size : 36527 KB
- Text-to-Speech : Enabled
- Screen Reader : Supported
- Enhanced typesetting : Enabled
- X-Ray : Enabled
- Word Wise : Enabled
- Print length : 337 pages
- Best Sellers Rank: 131,003 in Kindle Store (See Top 100 in Kindle Store)
- 4 in Central America History
- 48 in Minority Studies
- 54 in Archaeology (Kindle Store)
- Customer Reviews:
About the author

Douglas Preston is the author of thirty-six books, both fiction and nonfiction, twenty-nine of which have been New York Times bestsellers, with several reaching the number 1 position. He has worked as an editor at the American Museum of Natural History in New York and taught nonfiction writing at Princeton University. His first novel, RELIC, co-authored with Lincoln Child, was made into a movie by Paramount Pictures, which launched the famed Pendergast series of novels. His recent nonfiction book, THE MONSTER OF FLORENCE, is also in production as a film. His latest book, THE LOST CITY OF THE MONKEY GOD, tells the true story of the discovery of a prehistoric city in an unexplored valley deep in the Honduran jungle. In addition to books, Preston writes about archaeology and paleontology for the New Yorker, National Geographic, and Smithsonian. He is the recipient of numerous writing awards in the US and Europe, including an honorary Doctor of Letters degree from Pomona College. He currently serves as president of the Authors Guild, the nation's oldest and largest association of authors and journalists.
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Customer reviews
Top reviews from Australia
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Preston writes about past efforts - some more genuine than others - to locate Ciudad Blanca and then describes how modern military technology was used to conduct an aerial search of impenetrable jungle, which revealed the likely presence of some major Mesoamerican construction sites. Preston then formed part of the expedition that flew in to get a better look at what they had seen from the air.
Writing for a general audience, Preston focuses more on the boy's own derring-do aspects of the story, with lots of encounters with snakes and other critters, appalling weather and even a curse of sorts. On that level this is an absorbing and interesting read, but I would have preferred to learn more about the archaeological and anthropological significance of what they discovered there. It may be that there is not yet enough work done on these sites for much to be written about that, and hopefully there will be another book sometime that tells us more about the finds than the finding of them.
Top reviews from other countries


With SAS protection against lawless drug cartels and archaeological thieves, the team find the lost ruins (this is not a spoiler as the trip and discovery have been well documented).
But there the adventure turns sour and many of them experience the very thing which could have caused an entire civilisation to pack up and leave their world. Centuries old issues arise from disturbing the jungle ruins and whilst they don’t dampen the author’s enthusiasm for the tale, the end is a sobering insight into the consequences of history.


