A very entertaining book by Douglas Preston, who must be lauded both for having survived the expedition and for having chronicled its thrills and trials in under a year ... Mr. Preston knows a good character when he sees one, and Mr. Elkins’s obsession goes some way toward propelling the story. For sheer star power, however, he cannot beat Bruce Heinicke. Loud, profane, partial to Hawaiian shirts unbuttoned to make way for a gargantuan gut, Mr. Heinicke works as a fixer of sorts in Honduras ... Mr. Preston’s writing is breezy, colloquial and sometimes very funny...But he can also be sober, as when he talks about the Old World diseases that the Spanish brought to the New World.
This is a story of eccentric explorers, archaeological controversy, and political intrigue in one of the most dangerous countries in the Western hemisphere. But it is also about Honduras’s cultural patrimony and the ways we understand the history of pre-Columbian societies ... What Preston describes is hair-raising — jaguars on the prowl, deadly snakes everywhere — but also magical, a jungle world far removed from the 21st century ... Preston offers a persuasive defense of the mission and stresses its sensitivity to the cultural politics of discovery. His chapters on the meanings of the find are fascinating.
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, tempered by notes of regret ... The book’s most affecting moments don’t center on the ruminations of archaeologists, however, but rather on the otherworldly nature of the jungle — a place that Preston portrays as akin to a sentient creature ... For all his curiosity about the Mosquitia ruins, Preston exhibits puzzlingly little interest in Honduras itself. He appears to have met few ordinary Hondurans during his travels, and the book can occasionally feel clinical as a result ... few other writers possess such heartfelt appreciation for the ways in which artifacts can yield the stories of who we are.
As lost city reportage goes — and despite occasional hyperbole and the obligatory over-the-top title — The Lost City of the Monkey God is a well-documented and engaging read ... The author’s narrative is rife with jungle derring-do and the myriad dangers of the chase, highlighted by the deadly fer-de-lance, a snake so scary it would give Indiana Jones pause ... The author dutifully devotes space as well to the controversy in academic circles about this well-hyped archaeological sortie. One complaint is the splashy language used to describe its findings — with the book’s title being exhibit A.
Preston pushes The Lost City of the Monkey God well beyond the standard adventure narrative. In fact, the team's sweaty and swashbuckling days in Mosquitia make up just half the book. Instead, in prose no less gripping and visceral than his first-person account, Preston traces the myth of the White City back to its roots, exploring the earliest indigenous records of the lost civilization, retracing several ill-fated American expeditions — disrupting previously held beliefs in the process — and interviewing historians, archaeologists and other academics along the way. In an impressive sleight-of-hand, Preston often dives headfirst into historical context without losing the momentum of the adventure, rarely slipping into the passivity so often dogging historical prose.
If John McPhee writes the way Yo-Yo Ma plays the cello, Preston is at least first chair. When I finished the book, I immediately went online to look at the expedition photos on National Geographic’s website and from his descriptions was easily able to recognize the people, the artifacts, and especially the place, this stunningly, dangerously beautiful tropical wilderness lost to time for 500 years. Preston is clearly a man in love.
