The Lost City of the Monkey God

A True Story

De: Douglas Preston

Narrado por: Bill Mumy

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.

Reseñas de la Crítica

"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

"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

"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

"Breezy, colloquial and sometimes very funny...A very entertaining book."—The Wall Street Journal

"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

"A captivating real-life adventure tale... Preston deftly explains the science behind this work and makes it exciting."—Science News

"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

"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

"Packed with the power of realism and history unfolding."—The Star Ledger

"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

"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

Still Lost...

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.

Great story but reader not so good

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.

Good, but mot great.

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

Liked the book

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.

Full-spectrum archeology, totally accessible

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.

YIKES!

Excellent non-fiction that made my skin crawl. I learned more than I ever wanted to know about certain snakes and terrible diseases found in the mountains of Honduras as a journalist joins the hunt for lost cities.

Information that needs to be heard

Excellent writing. Very journalistic in approach. Very interesting for those interested in travel and history.
Reader did very well except for butchering the Spanish names and phrases.

Predicting 2020 Pandemic!

I listened to this book September 2020 during the Covid-19 pandemic! Preston accurately predicts this pandemic, how it spreads, and economic devastation it has caused.

Learned so much!

I didn't think I would like this book as much as I did. Narrator did a wonderful job and once started, I had a hard time putting down. If you're not sure on listening to this one, take a chance. It's worth the listen.

Good documentary

while I enjoyed the narrative, I was originally under the impression that it was going to be more of a fictional story based in fact.