The Lost Tomb: And Other Real-Life Stories of Bones, Burials, and Murder by Douglas PrestonMy rating: 4 of 5 stars
I didn’t realize what I was getting into when I picked this one up, but it’s got some amazing material. I can’t say that material adds up to a great book, but, if you want some excellent natural science writing – with a dash of drama – you can’t do better than a handful of these articles.
I dimly recognized Preston as the co-author with Lincoln Child of a series of books I’ll see (and ignore) at library bookstores. I did not recognize him, though, as the author of “The Mystery of Hell Creek,” an article I read in The New Yorker when it first came out in 2019…and that I enjoyed so much that I read it a second time soon after.
I’ve now read it a third time, and I still find it one of the most engaging science articles I’ve ever read. (It’s about an archeological site that seems to have captured the moment of the meteor crash that killed most of the dinosaurs and led to the rise of mammals.)
There are some other excellent pieces here. “The Monster of Florence” seems like it couldn’t be nonfiction, but it is. Preston tells of how, when he worked to cover the investigation of an Italian Serial Killer,” he got drawn into the case and was eventually charged – by a man he sees as a vengeful prosecutor angry that Preston was part of debunking his pet theory – as an accessory to the crimes himself.
And then my second favorite story here is “Trial by Fury,” which is a sort of sequel to “The Monster of Florence.” In it, he recounts how the same prosecutor went on to charge American Amanda Knox with murdering her roommate. When various on-line haters of Knox found out about Preston’s earlier clash with the prosecutor, they began attacking him in ways he couldn’t imagine.
Rather than answer those charges directly, Preston looks to evolutionary biology to explain a vitriol that mystifies him. I have long been interested in “sociopaths,” whom I understand as those individuals who put their own welfare ahead of the communal. Early humans worked together to survive with everyone taking chances to benefit the collective. Sociopaths, as I see them, recognized they could let others take chances while lying low and reaping the benefits.
In Preston’s reading, we developed a collective answer in the impulse to be outraged at people who violate what some see as the collective good. So, the anti-Knox haters saw Knox (and, by extension, Preston) as shirkers who needed to be called out.
I’m not giving a great paraphrase, but I found it compelling, and I’ve enjoyed mulling it over.
So, the best of these are terrific writing. In fact, all of this is well done to one degree or another…barring the occasional overdramatization.
At the same time, I think this is less than the sum of its fine parts. There’s a vanity to the project in that it’s a collection of Preston’s best nonfiction. But his nonfiction is less creative, personal writing and more journalism. And, if journalism is the first draft of history, many of these are first drafts that need to be updated to reflect new discoveries. Preston gives us a paragraph or two of update for many of them, but that’s not quite enough.
Instead, I feel as if many of these could, properly developed, worked as full-length books in their own right. Preston hasn’t wanted to put the time in for that – and why would he when he can team up with Child for surefire bestseller – so it feels like settling for something less.
Anyway, an interesting mixed bad, and a glimpse at someone who does what he does very well.
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