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Review of "Lost City of the Monkey God" by Douglas Preston

12/22/2016

36 Comments

 
​Sometimes writers become so close to their subjects that they lose the ability to see the big picture. When a journalist works too closely with a source, that journalist can unconsciously adopt the source’s world view, attitudes, and values, mistaking the source’s perspective for objective reality. This bias then colors the resulting work. In his new book The Lost City of the Monkey God (Grand Central Publishing, 2017), journalist and novelist Douglas Preston accidentally produced a chronicle of the development of his own blind spot as he comes increasingly to identify with the researchers who traveled to Honduras in search of the legendary White City, known at times as the City of the Monkey God.
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​Douglas Preston has written for a number of high-end magazines, and he is the author of a number of nonfiction books I have never read and author or coauthor of novels I have never heard of. From what I gather, at one point George Clooney was going to play Preston in a movie version of one of his investigations. I know of his work only what I have read in Lost City of the Monkey God and the New Yorker and National Geographic articles that he assembled as the backbone of the book.
 
Early reviews of Lost City have been quite positive, with Booklist calling it “captivating” and Kirkus declaring it “another winner.” I had the exact opposite impression, and I imagine that it is because I wrongly assumed that the book would have something of a connection to its title. It does not. I found myself flipping from page to page wondering when the author would get back to the title tale and stop talking about himself. The answer is that he does not.
 
Let’s state this up front: This is not a book about the Lost City of the Monkey God. It is not a book about the White City. It is not really even a book about archaeology. To my mind, it is a “book” mostly in the technical sense that it has a large number of uneven chapters fronted by a table of contents and backed by a useless list of sources unlinked to specific facts within the book. In terms of its content, however, it is not an analysis of the legend of the White City, a carefully researched account of Honduran archaeology, or even much of an adventure tale. This is instead a bit of a bait-and-switch. Preston lures the reader in with the promise that he will describe the discovery of the White City, but he then delivers an endless account of the hardship of trekking through the Honduran rainforest, some upset ranting about how the expedition’s critics are all jealous and bitter, and a final third of the book devoted to more detail than I ever cared to know about the leishmaniasis, the dangerous protozoan infection Preston acquired in Honduras.
 
Like most nonfiction books crafted in part from recycled material, the formula used to build the book is unartfully exposed: An idea is introduced, a personal anecdote is presented, and this is followed by an even longer info-dump before abruptly changing topic. It is inelegant. According to media accounts, Preston started revising his previous work into this book in October 2015, as soon as he had published his National Geographic article on the subject, and the book was complete in early 2016.
 
Preston’s involvement with the search for the White City goes back nearly twenty years, from when he first reported on the story for the New Yorker. Well, no, that’s not entirely true. What’s more correct is to say that Preston met filmmaker Steve Elkin in the 1990s and was seduced by his claims to have found the White City and thus spent twenty years in thrall to Elkin’s particular brand of macho bravado and derring-do. In the intervening decades, Preston has written about the White City for the New Yorker and for National Geographic, and he traveled with Elkin and his explorers hunting for the city on multiple occasions, particularly after Elkin claimed that the remote sensing technique known as LIDAR has revealed the outlines of a previously unknown city in the Mosquitia region of Honduras. He was present when the researchers found a cache of artifacts, and he was there trading stories with members of the Honduran president’s entourage when the president visited the site to promote its archaeological significance to Honduras. For his efforts, Preston contracted a stomach-turning tropical disease, along with other members of the expedition, and the men developed deep and lasting bonds that they maintain down to the present.
 
While this might have made for a fine profile of an expedition into the unknown, Preston has one huge blind spot that prevents him from telling a logical story. That blind spot is his unwillingness to deal with the myth of the White City and its consequences.
 
I have dealt with this myth before, but the long and short of it is that that the story of the White City is a modern invention that cannot be traced back before Eduard Conzemius recorded in 1927 that around 1905 or 1910 a rubber trapper made a report of a gigantic city, with buildings of white marble surrounded by a large white marble wall. “All the Indians say that they do not know of it and that it is all a myth,” Conzemius said. But in the late 1930s Theodore Morde claimed to find a “City of the Monkey God,” and this fiction became folded into the White City story, which in turn claimed as ancestor Hernán Cortés’s claim in the 1500s that there were reports of wealthy settlements in the Mosquitia region. In other words, the modern story is a fabrication.
 
Preston knows this, at least on one level. He admits partway through the book that the White City legend is not literally true. But he still wants to be able to use it at will, for sensationalism and to give his account a pulp flavor of fun and adventure that the facts alone might not support, particularly since so little actual work has been done at the site that it is unclear whether the place that Elkin’s team scanned is actually a city. Nevertheless, Preston simply chooses not to engage with the falseness of the legend. At one point, he specifically claims that the legend goes back to the Spanish Conquest—even though Cortés mentioned no ruins, no white walls, and no monkey god—and argues that legends are based on facts, so even though the story is false, the existence of any city in Mosquitia proves that the legend is based on truth. (He does so because Elkin’s team, by his own account, only researched documents “back almost a century,” and thus missed the lack of White City references prior to 1927.) The argument is circular, but it speaks to his need to justify the entire expedition with an appeal to a modern fiction. The appeal is coy: This isn’t the White City, Preston says, but the White City may have been based on whatever it is that he and his group found, so in essence it really is the White City after all. You can have your cake and eat it, too.
 
Even this would be forgivable if Preston did not want to use the fake legend as a cudgel to dismiss critics of Elkin’s expedition. Since the announcement that artifacts had been found, a number of academics and activists have vigorously protested the use of the White City label for a variety of reasons. Preston takes personally their criticism, for what I can only assume is his own identification with Elkin’s expedition and his feeling that he is part of the team being attacked. “I feel as though we’re on trial,” he quotes one expedition member, Alicia González, as saying. “How dare they?” In a fairly telling chapter, Preston devotes space to settle grudges with critics, attempting to humiliate archaeologist John Hoopes for a mistake in a Facebook posting on the topic, a remarkably petty use of space in a book, particularly since the author interviewed Hoopes and used him as an expert on the archaeology of Central America “despite being a critic of the project.” (Disclosure: I know Hoopes and have discussed the White City with him on multiple occasions.) Preston devotes space to defending Elkin’s team (and thus himself) from charges that applying a largely Euro-American myth to a genuine Native site has colonialist overtones, and he does so by essentially arguing that Hondurans believe the White City myth (and have since the 1960s), so if the myth is “true” in the sense given above, there can be no colonialism involved in applying it to the site.
 
Preston’s blind spot can be exemplified in a telling irony: Preston complains that critics were “concerned about language that felt like a throwback to the bad old colonialist, Indiana Jones days of archaeology.” But he fails to notice that he introduces into evidence Indiana Jones himself, Harrison Ford, as a celebrity supporter! In April Ford praised the site as an “extraordinary, globally significant ecological and cultural treasure.” What, pray tell, is the point of entering Harrison Ford in the ledger on your side if not to evoke the very Indiana Jones aura that with tepid lip service you condemn?
 
Here are Preston’s unvarnished views on colonialism, as given in his own book:

While I agree with most of this argument [about colonialism in archaeology] and am delighted that modern archaeological vocabulary is increasingly nuanced and sensitive, it poses a challenge for those of us writing about archaeology for a lay audience, since it is nearly impossible to find work-arounds for common worlds like “lost” and “civilization” and “discovery” without typing the English language up into knots. […] Archaeologists today don’t like the word “civilization” because it implies superiority, preferring the term “culture.” I will, however, continue to use the word “civilization” with the understanding that no such value judgement is meant; it is merely a term for a culture that is complex and widespread.
Is it so hard not to write of the “discovery of a lost civilization”? How about: “Archaeologists scanned a previously unmapped abandoned city, buried for at least 500 years.” I know. That was really hard. Language is always a choice, and Preston consistently chooses the language of Boy’s Own pulp adventure, and he justifies it by appealing to the ignorance of the audience. This strikes me as more of an acknowledgement that he is limited in his linguistic imagination. Preston’s publisher must agree. This is how they are billing the book: “#1 New York Times bestselling author Douglas Preston takes readers on an adventure deep into the Honduran jungle in this riveting, danger-filled narrative about the discovery of an ancient lost civilization.” It wouldn’t be out of place in a Boy’s Own adventure.
 
I won’t get into Preston’s speculation that because he suffered from a tropical disease that therefore the “lost civilization” his team investigated was also felled by disease, destroying the city. There is simply not enough evidence to know when the site was abandoned to even begin to hint at a cause. Preston uses it as an excuse to deliver a lecture on the power of disease to destroy Native American populations in the Contact Period, but the connection to the site that is theoretically the titular subject of the book is unproven at best.
 
Lost City of the Monkey God is not a book you should read to learn about lost cities or monkey gods, or the White City, or much of anything other than Preston’s jungle adventures or his he-man intestinal fortitude in the face of protozoans, snakes, and critics. If that’s your cup of tea, then you likely enjoy the book. If you were hoping for a well-researched account of the history, folklore, and archaeology of Mosquitia, you would be better off looking elsewhere.
 
___
 
Lost City of the Monkey God is available January 3 from Grand Central Publishing.
​
36 Comments
Clete
12/22/2016 11:47:13 am

Jason, you have got to stop fooling me with the titles. I thought that this was an article about what the City of Washington will become after January 20th, 2017.

Reply
Just some guy, you know?
12/25/2016 02:17:12 am

It won't exactly be lost to humans by then - only to reason.

Reply
El Cid
12/22/2016 11:47:51 am

I keep reading about this topic to grasp the situation as the archaeologists might summarize it.

It seems to me that given the recent LIDAR studies a not-terrible summary might be 'it appears that certain earlier-discovered sites in this part of Honduras are actually parts of much larger settlements with more structures and a greater expanse than researchers had ever studied.'

Recently similar investigations of the well-known site of Angkor Wat have likewise shown a much larger surrounding city/development but I haven't seen people saying it's a lost city or newly found civilization.

Sure it would be exciting to find a lost super amazing city or entire civilization, but discovering that a site thought to be comparatively small was actually a pretty big city?

Why can't that be enough?

I mean 'enough' for people not obsessed with claiming that any old ruins had to be built by aliens, nephilim, or a magic lost white/Atlantean race, or some exciting combination of all of those.

Reply
Bob Jase
12/22/2016 12:01:01 pm

Shorter review - just reread The Lost City of Z instead.

Reply
DaveR
12/22/2016 12:08:37 pm

I love his logic.

The myth is about a lost city. We found a lost city. Therefor the lost city we found is the lost city of the myth.

I bet if you pointed out that the myth is not true, it's a modern fabrication he would simply answer:

Since we all know myths are based on facts the myth MUST be based on an actual lost city. Since we discovered a lost city, we have proven the myth to be true. The lost city we found IS the lost city used for the basis of the myth.

How do you argue against such circular logic?

Reply
Jason Colavito link
12/22/2016 01:25:04 pm

His specific argument is that Mosquitia once had a thriving, complex Native culture, which collapsed sometime before, during, or after the Contact period. The memory of this culture gave rise to the White City myth. Therefore, the White City myth can be applied to any remnants of said culture. The problem is that the White City myth grew up in the shadow of Mayanism and can't be shown to have much, if any, direct connection to indigenous memory of Pre-Columbian Mosquitia. It's a possibility that the twentieth century fabricators of the myth had this in mind, but one needs more than an assertion to prove it.

Reply
DaveR
12/22/2016 02:07:12 pm

So he's pretty much saying any ruin can be ascribed as the White City.

Only Me
12/22/2016 12:32:14 pm

Ah, so, Scott Wolter Syndrome:

"to seek credibility by recounting one's struggles against academics, government, critics and facts; often used to argue for the validity of a claim"

Reply
Tom
12/22/2016 01:07:54 pm

Does this quote make any sense?
I can appreciate that an individual may struggle against Academics, government and critics, but a struggle against facts?
Perhaps somewhere along the twisty path of his "logic" I have lost my way.

Reply
Only Me
12/22/2016 01:13:12 pm

It's not an actual quote. That was just me kidding around with a format similar to what's in a dictionary. Sorry for the confusion, Tom.

DPBROKAW
12/22/2016 12:33:38 pm

Hey Jason, I was just looking at the merchandise section of your website. I liked the "Hooked X" T-shirts, but doesn't Scott Wolter have some kind of patent or ™ of the Hooked X?

Reply
Only Me
12/22/2016 01:11:23 pm

Wolter has a patent on the phrase "Hooked X™", but the symbol itself is in the public domain.

Reply
DPBROKAW
12/22/2016 03:58:02 pm

Thanks only me. I must admit that I can't understand how someone can patent a phrase. Actually it's just Scott Wolter that I can't understand (and his cohort in lies and disinformation).

David Bradbury
12/22/2016 04:48:42 pm

Wolter does not have a patent (it's not a technology or technique), he's just registered the term as a textual trademark.

Only Me
12/22/2016 11:53:01 pm

Thanks for the correction, David. I keep thinking patent because trademarks are registered at the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office in the U.S.

Shane Sullivan
12/22/2016 12:52:57 pm

He probably thinks the subject wouldn't captivate readers without sexy words like "lost", "civilization", and "monkey".

Reply
DaveR
12/22/2016 04:20:03 pm

You forgot "God" as another captivating word in his title.

Reply
Kal
12/22/2016 04:19:09 pm

Evidently the author watched Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull and mistook it for a historical documentary of an exploration of an ancient ruin. Easy to be confused since former H2 and History, still around, show Ancient Alien lost city stories they fabricated all the time.

Reply
DaveR
12/23/2016 07:34:08 am

Are you telling me the Indiana Jones sagas are fiction? Even in Indiana's father's note book you can clearly see various versions of the hooked x...how would they know about the archeological importance of the hooked x without some base in fact?

Reply
crainey
12/22/2016 05:04:55 pm

Monkey God of the Lost City?
Lost Monkey of the City God?
City Monkey of the Lost God?
Lost God of the Monkey City?
Lost City of the God Monkey?
City of the Lost Monkey God?
God of the Lost Monkey City?

The possibilities are endless!

Reply
DaveR
12/23/2016 07:44:09 am

I'm rather partial to the last entry...but I think "God of the City of Lost Monkeys" has potential as well. Maybe mash it in with "Lost Boys" but instead make the moneys into vampires. Tom Cruise can be the God vampire ruling over the city. When the vampire monkeys are unhappy with a ruling, they throw pooh at him. They can even be like the flying monkeys in "Wizard of Oz." R. Lee Ermey visits the city for an adventure segment for "Mail Call" and the monkeys love when Ermey shoots watermelons with machine guns. The vampire monkeys are so pleased with Ermey they overthrow Tom Cruise and make R. Lee Ermey the new God of the City of Lost Monkeys. I'm sure we could figure out a way to get Mathew Modine to do a cameo, maybe Private Pyle too.

Reply
Lemmiwinks
12/22/2016 09:15:12 pm

Preston has another connection to the fringe....along with Child he wrote the book Riptide which is a tale of Oak Island but off the coast of the US.

Reply
Day Late and Dollar Short
12/23/2016 09:38:21 am

But say I DID want to read a book about monkey gods...do you have a recommendation for that?

Reply
Shane Sullivan
12/23/2016 06:40:16 pm

I recommend Journey to the West and the Ramayana.

Reply
The curator
12/24/2016 08:30:45 pm

I second the recommendation for "Journey to the West".

Americanegro
12/23/2016 04:10:34 pm

Preston needs to learn that "civilization" simply means a culture that has at least one city. Civilization and culture are not synonyms.

Jason: "Derring-do is the standard spelling of the noun meaning daring deeds or heroic daring (used especially in reference to swashbuckling heroes). The phrase originated in a late 14th-century Geoffrey Chaucer poem, and it has taken many forms over the years—including durring don (in Chaucer, literally meaning daring to do), dorryng do, derring doe, and derrynge do. And given the term’s meaning and history, it is often understandably spelled daring-do. But as far as most English reference books are concerned, derring-do has been the correct spelling since Sir Walter Scott used it in Ivanhoe in 1819."

http://grammarist.com/spelling/derring-do/

Verbum sap.

Reply
Jason Colavito link
12/23/2016 06:02:48 pm

Duly noted and corrected. I learn something new every day.

Reply
Mark Bonta
12/23/2016 06:44:07 pm

Thanks for your excellent review, Jason.

Reply
John Hoopes link
12/23/2016 07:01:57 pm

For the lowdown on the White City, I recommend what remains as the most complete account available--a Wikipedia article:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/La_Ciudad_Blanca

For some insight into the scholarly debate about this project--perhaps even more entertaining that how it's presented in Preston's book--I recommend digging into the background of the Wikipedia article itself on its Talk page, especially the contentious debate between me and ThaddeusB, an overzealous Wikipedia editor whose idea of research was to heavily paraphrase Douglas Preston's May 2013 article in The New Yorker.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:La_Ciudad_Blanca/Archives/%25%251

Yes, a lot of the discussion is behind the scenes, but in fact quite a bit of it is out in public for anyone to see.

Reply
John Meffen link
12/23/2016 09:05:06 pm

But surely, this [ie Wikipedia], blogs, youtubers, and vanity publishing are all part of the problem. Not only do these snake oil salesmen get a platform, they then reference one another [in an easily available format] giving themselves a veneer of research/respectability.

This all takes away from the skill qualified researchers have learned through sifting through document after document.

A proper researcher referencing, say, Tacitus might quote Tacitus when no other sources are available, but never infer that Tacitus was infallible. Whereas I have seen references to Livvy on Wikipedia to parts of Ab Urbe Condita where all we know is the chapter title.

Reply
John Hoopes
12/25/2016 02:33:34 am

I offered the link to the Talk page archives for the Wikipedia article on La Ciudad Blanca to anyone who wants some insight into the backstory. I actually am a qualified and "proper" researcher who has sifted through documents, which is where the content of the Wikipedia article comes from. I think Jason has done a nice job of pointing out how Preston's narrative is a bit of a non-story with respect to the "discovery" of a "lost city". The use of LiDAR to find sites under heavy vegetation is worthy of attention. What made it unique in this case is that it was a project undertaken by non-archaeologists and privately funded by individuals who wanted to make a for-profit documentary film. In that sense, it was more of a treasure-hunting story than a scientific one. There has been a professional journal article about the project. It has not been mentioned by Jason. I wonder if it is mentioned by Preston.

John Meffen link
12/25/2016 06:35:52 pm

Sorry, John, I am in no way impuning everyone who curates Wikipedia, it is agreat resource I often use, in my football [soccer] related research, what I meant is that it's open-access policy means that some people, for whom I have little respect for their research are allowed to use the platform to continue their own beliefs. I would never say all, or even most, but they exist.

I have a continuing problem with a Wiki Curator from Yorkshire, England, who keeps correcting my correct spelling of a clubs name from where I live because it was once mispelt in a book with an ISBN number, even though I can go see this team nearly every week , he is the judge.

John

John Hoopes
12/25/2016 08:36:03 pm

I hear you, John. I had a similar experience with ThaddeusB, the Wikipedia editor with whom I had an edit war on the Ciudad Blanca article. Even though I'm a professional archaeologist with almost 40 years of experience in Central America, he insisted that Preston--a for-profit sensational writer--was a "reliable" source.

John Hoopes link
12/23/2016 07:08:12 pm

Jason writes:

"Is it so hard not to write of the 'discovery of a lost civilization'? How about: 'Archaeologists scanned a previously unmapped abandoned city, buried for at least 500 years.'"

That's okay, but the problem is still with the use of the term "city". as well as the trope of the "buried city".

How about: "'Archaeologists scanned a previously unmapped village, abandoned for at least 500 years"?

It's an accurate statement, but not one that makes headlines or sells books. The reality is that archaeologists find the remains of abandoned villages all the time, especially in Central America. "Lost city" is the pulp-fiction term. "Abandoned village", not so much.

Reply
Jason Colavito link
12/23/2016 09:59:54 pm

You are of course correct, John, but for the sake of the example I took for granted that Preston believed that the site he was writing about is big enough to qualify as a city.

Reply
Richard W. Cobbs
3/18/2017 08:21:34 pm

I have been looking at some of the articles and the National Geographic TV show on "The City of the Monkey God" and haven't seen any image of monkeys, except for the illustration that I believe came out around the same time as the movie "King Kong".
I bought a Meso-American rattle-legged- tripod bowl a couple of years ago that appears to me (certainly no expert) to portray a shamanic transformation. There are two protrusions from the bowl. One may be the head of a monkey, and the other may be a frog or dragon. If you are interested,I can send pictures.
Sincerely,
RWC

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