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Book: The Lost City of the Monkey God: A True Story
Quotes of Book: The Lost City of the Monkey
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  1. Douglas Preston _ The Lost City of the Monkey

    Perhaps the ghastliest disease endemic to mosquitia is Mucocutaneous Leishmaniasis, sometimes called white leprosy, caused by the bite of an infected sand fly. The Leishmania parasite migrates to the mucus membranes of the victim's nose and lips and eats them away, eventually creating a giant, weeping sore where the face used to be.
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  2. Douglas Preston _ The Lost City of the Monkey

    Far more than the casual recreation we think of when it comes to games of skill in Mesoamerican cultures the ball game was a sacred ritual that reenacted the struggle between the forces of good and evil. It might also have been a way for groups to avoid warfare by solving conflicts through a match instead, one that occasionally ended with human sacrifice…
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  3. Douglas Preston _ The Lost City of the Monkey

    to support this privileged class as long as they kept up their end of the bargain with effective rituals. But after 650, deforestation, erosion, and soil exhaustion began reducing crop yields. The working classes, the farmers and monument builders, may have suffered increasing hunger and disease, even as the rulers hogged an ever-larger share of resources. The society was heading for a crisis. Diamond writes: "We have to wonder why the kings and nobles failed to recognize and solve these seemingly obvious problems undermining their society. Their attention was evidently focused on their short-term concerns of enriching themselves, waging wars, erecting monuments, competing with each other, and extracting enough food from the peasants to support all those activities." {If this sounds familiar, I would note that archaeology is thick with cautionary tales that speak directly to the twenty-first century.}
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