It's not often you find a nonfiction page turner but this one was for me. In 2012, Douglas Preston traveled to Honduras as part of expedition to search for the mysterious Ciudad Blanca "White City" the subject of legends of an ancient Mayan metropolis called the Lost City of the Monkey God, deep in the Central American rain forest. Preston was on the expedition to document it for National Geographic. The expedition was a treacherous one with torrential rains, waist deep mud, disease carrying biting insects, and the deadly fer-de-lance viper. With the help of advanced laser technology the city was located and secured against looters with the assistance of the new Honduran government. After returning and reporting their findings including some speculation on how and why the city was abandoned. After their return the scientists and archaeologists came under attack from a faction of their peers for a variety of mostly unfounded accusations. But the worst was yet to come when Preston and most of the expedition members are afflicted with leishmaniasis, an insect-born parasite that eats flesh. With varieties of treatments, most recovered and were able to return to the site in 2016. The scariest part of the whole book is the information that this once tropical disease is spreading northward with the assistance of Global Warming. Preston's descriptions of the treacherous journey and the its aftermath make this nonfiction book read like a novel but is factual and in no way related to the Pendergast series written by Preston and Lincoln Child.
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