Alumni Book Club
The Imperial Alumni Book Club is here
Try something new today: connect with fellow Imperial graduates online to read and discuss books. There is no cost to join, you just have to source a copy of the books.
How does it work?
The Club will connect through a private online forum where members can discuss the current book and network with each other. The group will spend about two months on each book, so you'll have plenty of time to read.
Why should you join?
You don't need a reason to pick up a book, but here are three advantages of choosing to read with us:
- Take time for yourself to learn something new or discover a book you might not have chosen.
- Connect with Imperial alumni over words and ideas, have a conversation and enjoy a good debate.
- Benefit from professional moderators and facilitators to make sure you have a great experience and so the chat stays on track.
Our current book:
The Lost City of the Monkey God by Douglas Preston (May - July 2023).
A five-hundred-year-old legend. An ancient curse. A stunning medical mystery. And a pioneering journey into the unknown heart of the world's densest jungle.
Since the days of conquistador Hernán Cortés, rumors have circulated about a lost city of immense wealth hidden somewhere in the Honduran interior, called the White City or the Lost City of the Monkey God. Indigenous tribes speak of ancestors who fled there to escape the Spanish invaders, and they warn that anyone who enters this sacred city will fall ill and die. In 1940, swashbuckling journalist Theodore Morde returned from the rainforest with hundreds of artifacts and an electrifying story of having found the Lost City of the Monkey God-but then committed suicide without revealing its location.
Three quarters of a century later, bestselling author Doug Preston joined a team of scientists on a groundbreaking new quest. In 2012 he climbed aboard a rickety, single-engine plane carrying the machine that would change everything: lidar, a highly advanced, classified technology that could map the terrain under the densest rainforest canopy. In an unexplored valley ringed by steep mountains, that flight revealed the unmistakable image of a sprawling metropolis, tantalizing evidence of not just an undiscovered city but an enigmatic, lost civilization.
Venturing into this raw, treacherous, but breathtakingly beautiful wilderness to confirm the discovery, Preston and the team battled torrential rains, quickmud, disease-carrying insects, jaguars, and deadly snakes. But it wasn't until they returned that tragedy struck: Preston and others found they had contracted in the ruins a horrifying, sometimes lethal-and incurable-disease.
Suspenseful and shocking, filled with colorful history, hair-raising adventure, and dramatic twists of fortune, The Lost City of the Monkey God is the absolutely true, eyewitness account of one of the great discoveries of the twenty-first century.