The Lost World »

Sir Arthur Conan Doyle was both a doctor and a believer in spirits, which may partly explain why his Sherlock Holmes is one of literature's most beloved detectives: Holmes always approaches his cases with the gentility and logic of a scientist, but the stories are suffused with an aura of the supernatural. Narrated by devoted assistant Dr. John H. Watson, Holmes's adventures were so addictive that fans protested the master deducer's "death" in 1893 and Doyle had to resurrect him.

On a zoology expedition up the Amazon, Professor Challenger has made an inexplicable discovery. Back in London, his claims are ridiculed throughout the professional community. Reluctantly, he recounts to Journalist Edward Malone, "Curupuri is the spirit of the woods, something terrible, something malevolent, something to be avoided. None can describe its shape or nature, but it is a word of terror along the Amazon. Something terrible lay that way. It was my business to find out what it was."

Publishers Weekly

In 1912, Doyle took his Victorian readers deep into the South American jungles where, high atop a treacherous plateau, a small band of British explorers encountered a terrifying world of prehistoric creatures long thought lost to the sands of time. The adventurers included a young newspaper reporter, Ed Malone; the swashbuckling aristocrat, Lord Roxton; the skeptical scientist, Professor Summerlee; and the brilliant and bombastic Professor Challenger, who leads the party. Doyle unfolds high adventure at its best with fantastic encounters with pterodactyls, stegosaurs and cunning ape -men. Glen McCready's performance captures the time and tone of Doyle's material perfectly without straying into melodrama. He nicely balances Malone's sense of youthful wonder with the professors' scientific pragmatism, while fully exploiting the humor spread strategically throughout, planting numerous chuckles among the thrills. McCready's entertaining reading more than fulfills the author's introductory wish to "give one hour of joy to the boy who's half a man, or the man who's half a boy." (Feb.)

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1	There Are Heroisms All Round Us	9
2	Try Your Luck with Professor Challenger	19
3	He is a Perfectly Impossible Person	31
4	It's Just the Very Biggest Thing in the World	44
5	Question!	71
6	I Was the Flail of the Lord	93
7	Tomorrow We Disappear Into the Unknown	109
8	The Outlying Pickets of the New World	126
9	Who Could Have Foreseen It?	148
10	The Most Wonderful Things Have Happened	186
11	For Once I Was the Hero	210
12	It Was Dreadful in the Forest	237
13	A Sight I Shall Never Forget	263
14	Those Were the Real Conquests	288
15	Our Eyes Have Seen Great Wonders	313
16	A Procession! A Procession!	341