The Lost City of the Monkey God: A True Story

Interesting read. What starts as a travel log detailing the efforts to explore ancient cultures buried in the jungles of Honduras, takes a harrowing turn when half of the expedition party is stricken with a rare parasite that can cause disfigurement and death. Both subjects are fascinating, but it was not exactly what I was expecting. The descriptions of LIDAR technology were incredibly fascinating, something I'm vaguely familiar with in it's use to quickly build 3d models of real world objects. In the book they use it scan and map vast areas of dense jungle, uncovering sites that have been lost to the trees for centuries. The author also covers Honduran culture and history, helping to explain why traveling and exploring the country can be so dangerous and difficult - from officials seeking bribes, to venomous snakes, to drug traffickers hijacking trucks of jet fuel.

While I thought it was a good read, it got kind of slow in the middle, and the ending kind of meandered away from the heart of the story. The author comes to the conclusion that the civilization of the city of the Jaguar was wiped out by Europeans bringing disease, while at the same time acknowledging that the city has been so newly re-discovered that there has been hardly any research yet. While it is not a bad hypothesis, as many thousands of people died horribly of disease after contact with encroaching Europeans, there is no evidence as to why the culture of this ancient city may have collapsed.

Also, this book has one of the most depressing, fatalistic endings I have ever seen- with a discussion of how global warming is causing the spread of disease and parasites, and ending with a statement that all cultures collapse eventually. “Sometimes, a society can see its end approaching from afar and still not be able to adapt, like the Maya; at other times, the curtain drops without warning and the show is over. No civilization has survived forever. All move toward dissolution, one after the other, like waves of the sea falling upon the shore. None, including ours, is exempt from the universal fate.” It was a wild turn from the adventurous love of travel and discovery in the earlier parts of the book.