Hi friends, happy Wednesday! I hope you’re all having a great week so far! Today I’m going to be posting my review of Douglas Preston’s book The Lost City of the Monkey God.

The Lost City of the Monkey God by: Douglas Preston: This book was the accounts of journalist, Douglas Preston’s time spent in the Honduras jungles helping to find a lost city. As far as interest and intrigue went, this was a captivating read and kept the reader invested. Reading about a place that has yet to be discovered by modern civilization was definitely intriguing and reading it through a lens of someone who isn’t a scientist made it feel more personable and less scientific, although Preston does have an absorbing way of writing about medical terms. Halfway through the book, once the team returns home from the trip the book starts to talk about diseases of the world and to speculate what some of the team may have contracted. The tone of the book shifted from finding unknown lands and discovering cultures from long ago to talking about diseases. Although Preston does bridge the gap between the two to talk about diseases of the past, the big one being small pox, that would have killed off the Indigenous peoples of this land, and of the surrounding countries. There were a lot of themes that Preston touched upon, the main one being colonialism, but it only felt like we scratched the surface of history; at the same time this book touched on climate change and yet gave a short summary as to how that can also spark a disease. It was like Preston gave a quick mention to all these heavy factors that play a role in discovering new land. It was still eye opening to read about nonetheless and possibly a good starting place to learn about the subject. In the end this was a quick, engaging book that gives a very brief look into finding an undiscovered land.