Summary
Una leyenda de 500 años.
Una maldición antigua.
Un asombroso misterio médico.
Y un viaje de descubrimiento al corazón ignoto de la selva más densa del mundo.
Desde los días de Hernán Cortés han circulado rumores sobre una ciudad perdida con inmensas riquezas escondida en alguna parte de Honduras, llamada la Ciudad Blanca o la Ciudad Perdida del Dios Mono. Los pueblos indígenas hablan de ancestros que huyeron a ese lugar para escapar de los conquistadores españoles, y advierten que cualquiera que entre a esta ciudad sagrada enfermará y morirá. En 1940, el periodista estadounidense Theodore Morde regresó de la selva con cientos de objetos antiguos, asegurando haber encontrado la Ciudad Blanca. Sin embargo, se suicidó sin revelar su ubicación.
Tres cuartos de siglo después, el escritor Douglas Preston se unió a un equipo de exploradores en una nueva aventura. A bordo de un viejo avión monomotor, y gracias a un avanzado dispositivo láser, descubrieron la imagen inconfundible de una metrópoli entre el denso follaje selvático. Aventurándose en esta tierra salvaje, Preston y el equipo de investigadores se enfrentaron a lluvias torrenciales, arenas movedizas, insectos portadores de enfermedades, jaguares y serpientes. Sin embargo, no fue sino hasta su regreso que la tragedia los golpeó: Preston y otros descubrieron que habían contraído una terrible enfermedad en las ruinas.
Intrigante e impactante, plagada de aventuras estremecedoras y dramáticos giros de tuerca, La Ciudad Perdida del Dios Mono es el recuento verídico de uno de los grandes descubrimientos del siglo XXI.
ENGLISH DESCRIPTION
NAMED A NEW YORK TIMES NOTABLE BOOK OF 2017
#1 New York Times and #1 Wall Street Journal bestseller!
A Best Book of 2017 from the Boston Globe
One of the 12 Best Books of the Year from National Geographic
Included in Lithub''s Ultimate Best Books of 2017 List
A Favorite Science Book of 2017 from Science News
A five-hundred-year-old legend. An ancient curse. A stunning medical mystery. And a pioneering journey into the unknown heart of the world''s densest jungle.
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.
Douglas Jerome Preston was born on May 20, 1956 in Cambridge, Massachusetts. He received a B.A. in English literature from Pomona College in 1978. His career began at the American Museum of Natural History, where he worked as an editor and writer from 1978 to 1985. He also was a lecturer in English at Princeton University.
He became a full-time writer of both fiction and nonfiction books in 1986. Many of his fiction works are co-written with Lincoln Child including Relic, Riptide, Thunderhead, The Wheel of Darkness, Cemetery Dance, and Gideon's Corpse. His nonfiction works include Dinosaurs in the Attic; Cities of Gold: A Journey Across the American Southwest in Pursuit of Coronado; Talking to the Ground; and The Royal Road. He has written for numerous magazines including The New Yorker; Natural History; Harper's; Smithsonian; National Geographic; and Travel and Leisure. He became a New York Times Best Selling author with his titles Two Graves and Crimson Shores which he co-wrote with Lincoln Child, and his titles White Fire, The Lost Island Blue Labyrinth and The Lost City of the Monkey God.
(Bowker Author Biography)