Paradise Lost Eden with Leish and Fer-de-Lance.

In June 2015, Douglas Preston—amateur archaeologist, National Geographic journalist, and author of best-selling thrillers—entered an infusion suite at the National Institutes of Health sporting an “oozing crater, fiery red and disgusting to look at” on his left upper arm. Ensconced in the room’sweirdly large chairs, the 61-year-old breathed deep, ready to receive his initial hit of amphotericin B. “It was a total anticlimax,” Preston later reported in “The Lost City of theMonkey God,” a fast-paced, often harrowing saga of a recent expedition to Honduras. Published this year, the book describes adventurers, scientists, photographers, soldiers, and ex-commandos who found tantalizing traces of a lost civilization in a jungle called La Mosquitia. Roughly two thirds of the entourage,more than thirty people, also contracted leishmaniasis. In January 2017, I learned of “The Lost City of the Monkey God” through an e-mail. Later that morning, could I travel to a nearby studio to provide expert perspective on leishmaniasis? a TV producer gamely asked. Well, no, I replied. But by now I was sufficiently intrigued to request the book from my library. Once I read the chapter in which Doctors Ted Nash and Elise O’Connell started to treat Preston’s Leishmania brasiliensis infection, and the author alsomet NIH researcher David Sacks and inspected colonies of sandflies and leish-infected mice, I privately thanked “Inside Edition” for leading me to a perfect candidate for The Tropical Bookshelf. “Danger porn” is a term some have applied to Preston’s spellbinder, which certainly offers its share of edge-of-theseat scares. But before considering Honduras’s bounty of vipers, jaguars, and quicksand, would you like to learn more about Theodore Morde, a Massachusetts-born journalistcum-deceiver who first covered the Spanish Civil War, then traveled toMosquitia to slake his lust for gold at the same time cabling fake accounts of a legendary Ciudad Blanca (White City)? If your answer is yes, Preston delivers. Then there’s 19 century banana baron Samuel Zemurray, AKA “Sam the Banana Man,” a one-time pushcart seller who eventually bilked both J. P. Morgan and the U.S. government. Long before the country became famous for narco-trafficking, Preston coolly remindsus, “the fruit companies left adark colonist legacy that has hung like a miasma over Honduras ever since.” Back to the 21 century. If the denseMosquitia rainforest is Eden in ruins, there must be a snake, right? Oh boy, is there a snake. A fer-de-lance appears the same night Preston and company set up camp. Preston is the first to spy the savage viper, its eyes fixed, its tongue flickering. One-time jungle commando Andrew Wood then brandishes a machete and lopsoff thebranchof a tree, swiftly forming a long, forkedpole.