Lost City of the Monkey God

I really wanted to like this book. Actually, I did like it, but thought it fell somewhat short of the book cover blurb promises of “stunning” and “battling torrential rains” and a “stunning medical mystery.”

The books starts out fairly well (but what book doesn’t? I suppose there are books that start out crappy and then pick up at the end but who would make it to the end?), with Preston explaining the history of the area they will be exploring. This section though, makes up about a third of the book. The actual initial exploration part of Mosquitia that the author is present for, takes place in roughly under 100 pages, but is a quick-paced read and there was some interesting stuff about the use of lidar (which works like radar but with lasers) to map areas under dense vegetation.

The remainder of the book covered some of the controversy that surrounded the exploration and the illness that the team members suffered upon their return. The book’s back cover calls what they faced a “stunning medical mystery” that was the result of a “mysterious-and-incurable-disease.”

Medical spoilers ahead!

That disease turns out to me leishmaniasis (leish for those unfortunate enough to be personally familiar with it), a disease transmitted by the sand fly. While I certainly wouldn’t want it, I was a bit put off about the author’s writing about the disease and the treatment. To begin with, to say that it is incurable implies that it’s something that you actively have for the rest of your life. Instead, what happens is that after successful treatment, the parasite hides in your body, but is at such levels that the immune system can generally manage it. This is similar to chicken pox which many people have had, but that don’t go around saying they have an incurable disease. The description of the treatment and the side effects also seems to be outsized, based on a super-quick google of the disease.

I should also say that at one point I had (have?) a perhaps unhealthy interest in reading breast cancer blogs. And in these blogs (see But Doctor, I Hate Pink for one of the best examples), there are descriptions of treatment that are much worse than Preston’s leish treatment, but that are written about with such clear-eyed accuracy that is tinged with gallows humor that you both get a sense of the seriousness of the disease and of the humanness of the writer.

I mean, I get it, you need to sell books and adventure and mystery and hardship do a good job of that and I have no doubt the author is a very capable writer. I just thought that this book would have been better suited as a long form article or series of articles than trying to puff it out to a full size book.

So there. I promised myself I would write a quick review of each book I read before moving onto the next one, because I read a fair amount but sometimes come back to a book I know I’ve read before and the only thought is “huh, I know I read that and liked/disliked it, but can’t recall any of the details.” So here’s to 2018 and more books!