Lost City of the Monkey Gods Book Review

 Preston, Douglas    Lost City of the Monkey Gods                            

Archaeology and Anthropology have been in my blood since college. The theatre kind of sidetracked me for some forty years, but I remain today an avid consumer of the life and lore of ancient societies.  The cover of the Lost City of the Monkey Gods jumped at me and almost immediately I was immersed in the  search for a hidden city lost for five hundred in the tropical jungle of Honduras. The early chapters of the book recount early legends and the search for this city over the last hundred years. Then with the introduction of new ground coverage penetrating radar and satellite imagery enough evidence was produced to set up a ground expedition to visit it.  

Then came chapters devoted to the expedition itself.  We learned about the difficulties of securing the necessary permissions and permits and then about the logistics for establishing a camp in an area of unexplored jungle that was deemed to be filled with poisonous snakes, predatory mammals, and hordes of nasty insects.  The city was there and there were even undisturbed artifacts to preserve.  

As the public and other scholars learned about the discovery efforts were made to attack the scientific credentials of the explorers, but they persevered. Unfortunately, while fighting the public relations battle, a number of members of the team came down with a dangerous and life threatening tropical parasitical disease. The affliction has been traced all the way back to the dinosaurs and is still a scourge in many jungle environments.  A complete cure has not been found even today.  

At this point the book shifts to a discussion of pandemics in human history and how they spread. The prime exemplar was the decimation of New World populations by Old World conquerors carrying diseases which the New World population had no immunity to. Preston feels that our new problem is that the current First World is faced by a potential attack by Third World diseases. He observes that as the climate warms tropical diseases will begin to infect more and more northern latitudes. Aids, Zica, West Nile, etc. are increasing as the climate warms. The sand flea that carries the Leish parasite (which infected the expedition members) has now been recorded as far north as Oklahoma.  

While starting as a thrilling story of archaeological discovery the book turns into a scary trope on the next possible threat to world population. Fascinating.