The Lost City of the Monkey God
“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…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.”
AudioFile
New York Times Notable Book of 2017
A Boston Globe Best Books of the Year selection
A New York Times Bestseller
A 2017 Literary Hub Pick for Best Setting: Like the Academy Award for Best Cinematography
A Publishers Weekly Best Book of 2017
A Shelf Awareness Best Book of 2017
An Amazon Editor’s Top Pick for January 2017
A Signature Best Book on Legendary and Mythic Cities
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.
Praise