I wish I read the book I’m describing…

It’s too hokey to say that I liked this at first but it lost me, but … well…

The book doesn’t really have a climax and as a result just sort of meanders from event to event despite the fact that they find an actual lost city in the jungle untouched for years. The buildup to finding the city is so intense – scanning the jungle with high tech lasers, equipping the team with snake prevention measures and cautioning them against tropical diseases, securing the clearances from government officials without clueing in others to what they expected to find – that when they actually find the city it’s treated surprisingly uneventfully. The fallout from the insect borne illnesses the team experienced is treated more dramatically.

There was also a large amount of the book that seemed to be thumbing its nose at rivals – anecdotes about other archaeologists who critiqued the team appear to have been included only so the author could point out they had improper clearance on their own expeditions or to talk about how they were booed out of a talk by one of his team.  That said, Preston admirably makes plain the ambiguities in his own expedition, from uncertainty about whether the Honduran government has authority to grant permission for an expedition to catalogue the remnants of a culture it displaced, and whether the responsibility of the team was to preserve artifacts from looters by removing them from the site or to keep the site itself untouched.

Reading my synopsis, I like the book I’m describing more than the one I actually read.