Jungle of Stone by William Carlsen

Jungle of Stone by William Carlsen is a 528-page hardcover published in 2016 by William Morrow, and is a stated first edition.  The dust jacket has light wear to the corners.  The book is in very good condition.  Book Summary In 1839, rumors of extraordinary yet baffling stone ruins buried within the unmapped jungles of Central America reach two of the world's most intrepid travelers. Seized by the reports, American diplomat John Lloyd Stephens and British artist Frederick Catherwood--both already celebrated for their adventures in Egypt, the Holy Land, Greece and Rome--sailed together out of New York Harbor on an expedition into the forbidding rainforests of present-day Honduras, Guatemala, and Mexico. What they found would rewrite the west's understanding of human history. In the tradition of Lost City of Z and in the Kingdom of Ice, former San Francisco Chronicle journalism Pulitzer Prize finalist William Carlsen reveals reveals the extraordinary story of the discovery of the ancient Maya. Enduring disease, war, the torments of nature and terrain, Stephens and Catherwood meticulously uncovered and documented the remains of an astonishing civilization that has flourished in the Americas at the same time as classic Greece and Rome and had been its rival in art, architecture, and power. The remarkable book about the experience, written by Stevens and illustrated by Catherwood, became a sensation, hailed by Edgar Allan Poe as perhaps the most interesting book of travel ever published and recognized today is the birth of American archaeology. By the time of the flowering of classical Greece (400 B.C,) the Maya were already constructing pyramids and temples around central plazas. Within a few hundred years the structures took on monumental scale that required millions of man hours of labor, and technical and organizational expertise.  At their peak, an estimated 10 million people occupied the Maya's heartland on the Yucatan Peninsula, aregion were only half a million now live. And yet by the time in Spanish reach the "New World" the Maya had all but disappeared they would remain a mystery 300 years. Jungle of Stone is equally a thrilling adventure narrative and a revelatory work of history that corrects our understanding of Stephens, Catherwood, and the Maya themselves. ISBN:  978-0-06-240739-9