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    Jungleland: A Mysterious Lost City, a WWII Spy, and a True Story of Deadly Adventure
    Jungleland: A Mysterious Lost City, a WWII Spy, and a True Story of Deadly Adventure
    Jungleland: A Mysterious Lost City, a WWII Spy, and a True Story of Deadly Adventure
    Audiobook7 hours

    Jungleland: A Mysterious Lost City, a WWII Spy, and a True Story of Deadly Adventure

    Written by Christopher S. Stewart

    Narrated by Jeff Brick

    3.5/5

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    About this audiobook

    "I began to daydream about the jungle...."

    On April 6, 1940, explorer and future World War II spy Theodore Morde (who would one day attempt to assassinate Adolf Hitler), anxious about the perilous journey that lay ahead of him, struggled to fall asleep at the Paris Hotel in La Ceiba, Honduras.

    Nearly seventy years later, in the same hotel, acclaimed journalist Christopher S. Stewart wonders what he's gotten himself into. Stewart and Morde seek the same answer on their quests: the solution to the riddle of the whereabouts of Ciudad Blanca, buried somewhere deep in the rain forest on the Mosquito Coast. Imagining an immense and immaculate El Dorado–like city made entirely of gold, explorers as far back as the Spanish conquistador Hernán Cortés have tried to find the fabled White City. Others have gone looking for tall white cliffs and gigantic stone temples—no one found a trace.

    Legends, like the jungle, are dense and captivating. Many have sought their fortune or fame down the Río Patuca—from Christopher Columbus to present-day college professors—and many have died or disappeared. What begins as a passing interest slowly turns into an obsession as Stewart pieces together the whirlwind life and mysterious death of Morde, a man who had sailed around the world five times before he was thirty and claimed to have discovered what he called the Lost City of the Monkey God.

    Armed with Morde's personal notebooks and the enigmatic coordinates etched on his well-worn walking stick, Stewart sets out to test the jungle himself—and to test himself in the jungle. As we follow the parallel journeys of Morde and Stewart, the ultimate destination morphs with their every twist and turn. Are they walking in circles? Or are they running from their own shadows? Jungleland is part detective story, part classic tale of man versus wild in the tradition of The Lost City of Z and Lost in Shangri-La. A story of young fatherhood as well as the timeless call of adventure, this is an epic search for answers in a place where nothing is guaranteed, least of all survival.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherHarperAudio
    Release dateJan 8, 2013
    ISBN9780062265906
    Author

    Christopher S. Stewart

    Christopher S. Stewart is an investigative reporter at the Wall Street Journal, where he shared a 2015 Pulitzer Prize for Investigative Reporting. His work has appeared in GQ, Harper’s, New York Times Magazine, New York, The Paris Review, Wired, and other publications, and he also served as deputy editor at the New York Observer and is a former contributing editor at Condé Nast Portfolio. Stewart is the author of Hunting the Tiger and Jungleland. He lives with his family in New York.

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    Reviews for Jungleland

    3.5/5

    67 ratings10 reviews

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    • 4/5
      A modern day reenactment of an old explorer's search for a lost city in the same vein as David Grann's The Lost City of Z but not of the same calibre as that book. Christopher Stewart follows in the footsteps of Theodore Morde who explored Honduras during the late 1930s looking for the fabled "White City". Chapters alternate between telling Morde's story and Stewart's. Morde's story comes from extensive diaries he kept during his expedition and life. An entertaining story, well-written and an enjoyable read. The title of the book is a bit of a misnomer mentioning the WWII Spy bit as Morde did go on to do this after his exploration but this occupies only about two chapters of the book near the end. The book is about explorers, exploration, and lost civilizations, not wartime espionage. While the tale is a captivating read for those who enjoy jungle exploration, nothing much of actual note really happens. Neither Morde nor Stewart faced any unusual or unique dangers nor enthralling experiences. I enjoyed Morde's story the most. Stewart I found hard to like from the get-go. Here is a married man, father of a three-year old child who picks up and takes off for the jungle, a potentially life threatening action, for purely selfish reasons, trying to "find himself", etc. mostly against his wife's wishes though she doesn't make much fuss according to the author. I just found him an unlikeable, immature person and though he laments what he's done and "grows" through the experience, I found myself thinking about his poor wife and daughter left worrying about him back home while he basically traipsed around on this fool's errand. So, an interesting story but mostly for the historical aspect of Theodore Morde's story, in my opinion. I would have preferred a book just about Morde and not the author and his ego.

      1 person found this helpful

    • 5/5
      Very fun read. Loved the mix of first person and history.
    • 5/5
      Jungleland is a true story that reads like fiction. This story is part adventure story and part WW2 spy story. I liked the short chapters and all the interesting characters Stewart meets along the way. Stewart is in search of the White City deep in the Honduran jungle. He tries to follow the same route Theodore Mode's expedition took in 1940. Will he find it and does the Ciudad Blanca actually exist?
    • 2/5
      This book reads like the written edition of Expedition Unknown. A contemporary author is trying to follow the trail of an earlier explorer in the jungle. very hard to get into - not my favorite form of literature. Harder to read than see on TV.
    • 4/5
      Stewart, a journalist who "doesn't like camping" sets out to find a mysterious lost city in the Amazon rainforest. Alternating with his own story, he recounts the tales of others who have searched for the same goal. In my opinion, the success of this type of travel/adventure depends upon both the attitude and the storytelling ability of the author. An overly high opinion of oneself or the importance of one's "mission," or an inability to tell a story well are the two reasons some attempts at this fall flat. Stewart does not take himself or his "quest" so seriously that you want to laugh at him,but yet, his reactions and experiences feel genuine and interesting. He also tells the stories of others quite well. I would recommend this to anyone who enjoys the travel/adventure genre. It is neither hardboiled nor saccharine, striking just the right balance for an exciting but essentially frivolous adventure story.
    • 2/5
      This could have been a fascinating book. But the author is a whiner having some sort of crisis. Two stars because its still an exciting story notwithstanding.
    • 3/5
      I love stories about explorers and modern people retracing their steps in exotic places. This book meets those criteria.
    • 4/5
      Travel books have always been a favorite of mine. I love to travel, but don't get the opportunity to do so often enough, so I have to explore the world vicariously through books. When I read the description of Jungleland, it immediately caught my attention, because it combines my love of travel and my fascination with archaeology and lost civilizations. I was very excited to read it.I wasn't disappointed. Christopher Stewart has crafted a fascinating, well-written book that is less travelogue than adventure. He also does an outstanding job of comparing his own experiences with that of Theodore Morde, who made the journey over 50 years before. The alternating chapter points of view was a little jarring at first, but after a few chapters I got used to it and actually began to enjoy it.It's easy to think that the world is entirely explored, a known quantity. In this information age, when we can simply log onto the Internet to learn about anything we want to, we don't realize that there are so many places that are completely untouched by modern man. Stewart goes into just such places, and the story he tells of each place he stops is riveting. Even more, though, is the story within the story, of how his own attitudes and life are changed by the trip he takes and the people he meets. this, to me, is the mark of a great travel/adventure book; it certainly marks my own favorites, whether it is Walk Across America by Peter Jenkins (which introduced me to the genre) or Bruce Feiler's explorations of faith, religion, and geography in his books. The physical journey is only really half the story in these books, and it is fascinating to see how the trip changes the author.
    • 4/5
      Don’t come to this book expecting much about the wartime espionage activities of Theodore Morde. Apart from an episode in Istanbul where he talks with Franz von Pappen, Germany’s ambassador to Turkey and an old spymaster himself, about assassinating Hitler, this book has little to offer in that area, and you’d be better off just going straight to the listed bibliographic sources.While I didn’t get the espionage history I hoped for when picking up this book, I still enjoyed it. Stewart moves his narrative along quickly, alternating between Morde’s life – particularly his 1939 expedition to the Mosquito Coast –and his own expedition (with archaeologist Chris Begley as a guide) to that area 70 years later. Stewart juggles so many things in this book – archaeological discovery, self-discovery, Morde’s life, espionage, and Honduran history – that, if you’re bored with one subject, your area of interest quickly shows up again. The flip side of that is, of course, that it’s more of an appetizer than a meal, but it’s still an enjoyable book and not a major investment of time. I particularly enjoyed the encounters with Hondurans (and tourists) in both time periods.And, yes, there is a resolution of sorts to the matter of whether Ciudad Blanca exists.
    • 3/5
      First Line: The man called himself Rana, or Frog.Armed with a World War II spy's personal notebooks and the mysterious coordinates carved into the man's walking stick, journalist Christopher S. Stewart goes to Honduras to see if he can do what the spy (Theodore Morde) claimed he did in 1940: find the Ciudad Blanca-- the white city of gold hidden deep in the rain forest of the Mosquito Coast, one of the wildest places on Earth. What the journalist would learn is that the journey itself oftentimes is more important than reaching a destination. Alternating chapters tell us of Stewart, a New Yorker with a bad back and no fondness for camping or hiking, who decides to go off on this adventure even though there's political unrest in the area. Compared with the chapters on him, the ones about Theodore Morde sound like Indiana Jones. Morde was a seasoned amateur when he set out through the jungle in 1940. He'd already circled the globe five times and covered the Spanish Civil War with Ernest Hemingway and George Orwell. After claiming that he had found Ciudad Blanca, Morde would go on to become a spy during World War II and attempt to assassinate Hitler. I found this book to be uneven. As long as the author focused on Morde and Morde's expedition or on the facts of his own, I found it very interesting. However, Stewart's attempt to show The More Sensitive Side of Explorer Man sounded too much like whining. Blisters, rain, heat, missing his family, listening to his wife whine about things she should have been able to take care of in his absence... these things all brought the enjoyment factor down further and further for me. If you like finite results in books like this, you may want to rethink reading this book. There are no real results to either man's journey into the jungle unless you count what Stewart learned about himself. However, as uneven as I think the book is, it is worth reading if you enjoy the search for lost civilizations. As wired and modern as most of us are, it makes me smile to think that there are still lots of adventures like this to be had on this planet.