The Lost World by Arthur Conan Doyle (Epub)

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This book was converted from its physical edition to the digital format by a community of volunteers. You may find it for free on the web. Purchase of the Kindle edition includes wireless delivery.

User’s Reviews

Amazon.com Review Forget the Michael Crichton book (and Spielberg movie) that copied the title. This is the original: the terror-adventure tale of The Lost World. Writing not long after dinosaurs first invaded the popular imagination, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle spins a yarn about an expedition of two scientists, a big-game hunter, and a journalist (the narrator) to a volcanic plateau high over the vast Amazon rain forest. The bickering of the professors (a type Doyle knew well from his medical training) serves as witty contrast to the wonders of flora and fauna they encounter, building toward a dramatic moonlit chase scene with a Tyrannosaurus Rex. And the character of Professor George E. Challenger is second only to Sherlock Holmes in the outrageous force of his personality: he’s a big man with an even bigger ego, and if you can grit your teeth through his racist behavior toward Native Americans, he’s a lot of fun. –This text refers to an alternate kindle_edition edition.

Reviews from Amazon users, collected at the time the book is getting published on UniedVRG. It can be related to shiping or paper quality instead of the book content:

⭐ This is not a review of the story – we all know Sir Arthur Conan Doyle from the Sherlock Holmes stories; this is a different collection of stories from The Strand Magazine in 1912 that has become, over the years, a well-known classic.My review is about this particular edition published by Callas Editions, Mineola NY (it was actually printed in China – can’t we even print books anymore?). Anyway. It’s a hardcover with a green canvas skin. It’s approximately 7 inches wide by 11 inches high. The font is excellent – it’s extremely readable at a good size for older eyes. It’s 226 pages of high quality heavy paper, unabridged, with just under 50 original sepia illustrations of creatures, characters and various story scenes by Harry Rountree.I prefer reading hardcovers to paperbacks, and I don’t do e-books at all. For fictional adventure stories like this one, images are always a nice bonus. For those who enjoy reading the old-fashioned way, I can highly recommend this edition.

⭐ I picked this up in between rereading Michael Crichton’s Jurassic Park and Lost World: Jurassic Park. I’m not sure when I actually learned or just remembered this book existed, but thought I might as well read it before I got immersed in the Lost World.I did not love this book. I don’t read a lot of Arthur Conan Doyle, I am sure we read Hound of the Baskervilles in Junior High and I know I haven’t read any Sherlock Holmes since then. But I love the idea that there is a lost prehistoric area with dinosaurs still in existence in South America – what an excellent premise! I was excited to read this book.What I hadn’t expected was the racism, almost from the beginning, that left me almost giving up on this book and questioning whether I should read classics like this one if they are this racist.Examples:“The natives were Cucama Indians, an amiable but degraded race, with mental powers hardly superior to the average Londoner.”The constant referring to “half-breeds” in South America. I don’t actually know what this means. I’m guessing people of native South American decent and European decent (presumably Portuguese or Spanish). I’m pretty sure every mention of half-breed was derogatory in this book.“The first is a gigantic negro named Zambo, who is a black Hercules, as willing as any horse, and about as intelligent.”Zambo is then constantly referred to as their faithful servant, much like a dog would be, and it is not good.Any reference to the native peoples of South America. I don’t think it is a spoiler to say that the explorers get double crossed by their Indian guides and abandoned partway through this book, and there is a large amount of hostility directed against these Indians.I could go on, but if you are thinking about reading this book, please be aware that there are a lot of racist comments, especially about the native peoples of South America and the “superiority” of Europeans, and it is pretty disgusting. This book was published in 1912, but that does not excuse the racism here. Plenty of authors from this time period and earlier have written much less racist books.As for the plot, the premise involves the narrator, a journalist, joining a group of (privileged, white European) men traveling to South America to verify or disprove Professor Challenger’s claim that prehistoric creatures exist. Professor Challenger himself later joins the expedition, and along with many Indians, they travel up the Amazon and deep into the rainforest and find the high plateau, which is surrounded on all sides by cliffs that jut out, making it near impossible to climb. After wandering around and eventually finding a way up, the four British men (but none of their helpers/native people) make it up on to the plateau and the four explorers have no way back down. On the plateau, they discover dinosaurs.While it would have been fun to focus the rest of the plot on the dinosaurs (because dinosaurs are fun to read about!), unfortunately, the plot takes a turn for the “weird”, where the focus shifts to the group discovering that the plateau is also inhabited by “ape-men”, who are a “missing link” in human evolution. The “ape-men” attack the group of explorers as well as a group of Indians, which also somehow live on this plateau that otherwise has been undisturbed for 65 million years if we are to believe that there are dinosaurs present, and the ape-men kill many Indians before the white men with guns show up, and basically slaughter all the adult male ape-men, and make the females and children ape-men (ape-people? They are always referred to as ape-men) into slaves for the Indians. (Is this a spoiler? The book is over 100 years and it might be nice to know what you are getting with this book. Mass hominid slaughter and enslavement – that is what you are getting.) This is certainly very problematic. Not only would the discovery of ape-people who are a missing link be an amazing scientific discovery and something worthy of studying, killing them off seems unnecessarily cruel. Anyway, eventually they get off the plateau and go back home.This book is weird. There was a great premise there, dinosaurs, stuck on a plateau, nothing evolving because it is an isolated environment. I’m no specialist on the history of the study of evolution, so I’m not entirely sure when we learned that something like this would never, ever happen. When animals are in an isolated environment with limited resources such as the plateau described here, evolution tends toward smaller versions, for example pygmy animals on islands. There is no way the amount of land on the plateau could support the vast number of dinosaurs described, but I do realize this is a fiction book written over a hundred years ago and maybe that was not known at the time. As for the ape-men, this is especially problematic. Their first instinct is to kill off the humans (except the one that looks like them). Any reference to any non-white humans as “less intelligent” or “less civilized” or “less evolved” is frustratingly racist.IF there were to be another human species alive today like Neanderthals or Homo erectus, they would not be “less evolved” than modern day Homo sapiens, just slightly different genetically. There is no end point to evolution, just selection for those best suited to the current environment. (And horses or octopuses aren’t “less evolved” than humans either, just a different branch of the same tree.) I’m not sure this book actually needed the whole “dinosaurs exist here but so does the missing link and now we are warring with the ape-men” plot line. For practical purposes, there is no evidence “ape-men” existed anywhere in the New World, although this was probably unknown in 1912.Java man, a Homo erectus fossil found on the island of Java and thought to be 700,000-1 million years old, was discovered in 1891-92 and this discovery was possibly on Doyle’s mind when he thought up this missing link idea. Exactly when humans first came to North America and South America is a hotly debated archaeological question, and maybe H. erectus did make it to the New World a million years ago by boats and we just haven’t found evidence of this yet, but it is unlikely at this point that that happened. Ok, that took a bit of a hard anthropology turn. “Missing links” are interesting because they can tell us a bit about who our ancestors were and how we evolved. But the way they are portrayed (and brutally killed off) in this book is bad.There were not enough dinosaurs in this dinosaur book! Of special note, pterodactyls, which also live on the plateau, can fly down off the plateau to attack people in the immediate area surrounding the plateau. What keeps them from actually flying away, building other pterodactyl communities in other locations? This was never explained and is one of many plot holes this book has to offer.This was an interesting concept. I did not like the blatant racism. I did not like the speciesism (I just looked up that word, that is how it is spelled and it does exist). I really do not like that there are several more books in the “Professor Challenger” series that I feel mildly interested in reading, because I do like classic sci-fi.This book made me analyze whether there is value in reading racist classics. I think there is a lot we can learn from classics, like how people used to think, and there is some great story telling in some of these older books, but the overt racism in this book was off putting. I think I’ve decided that reading a wide variety of books (including some classics which may now be considered racist at least by me) will make me a well rounded reader. Just reading the book does not mean that I support or am tolerant of the racism presented in the book, and at least gives me an opportunity to think about my own values and realize how much our history is built on racism (but does not mean our future has to be). Am I going to actively seek out more Arthur Conan Doyle books to read? No. I might continue the Challenger series because I like sci-fi, I will probably not rush to read all the Sherlock Holmes though.

⭐ Light read, but beautifully done. Not complex but we’ll crafted in a way I believe is not common among contemporary writers. I liked that Doyle takes more words, better words, to describe the environment. The creature descriptions are wonderfully fantastic. I won’t give away spoilers but I will say where the protagonist ends up in the end is brilliant, and teaches the male reader a thing or two about genuine manliness. Read this on a recommendation from an older coworker, glad I did and would easily pass this recommendation on. Well worth the read.

⭐ This classic by Arthur Conan Doyle was a favorite of mine growing up, and I wanted to buy a nice paperback copy for my daughter who likes both science and fantasy novels. I did not pay much attention to which of several available editions to pick, liked the cover photo of this one because it does not spoil the reader’s discovery of what sort of creatures the “lost world” contains, and figured that there was little any publisher could do to mar the text of Arthur Conan Doyle.Doyle’s text is indeed intact and despite being written over a hundred years ago will, I think, still appeal to a young reader today. But, I nonetheless feel swindled. SaltHeartPublishers (whose website says it is based in the “beautiful Blue Ridge Mountains of Virginia” and that it aims “to provide the public with quality reading material and bring attention to literary works relevant to our times”) seems to have little notion of what a normal book looks like. I am not a lawyer, and there are evidently legal issues relevant here, but I have difficulty understanding why a book might have to be printed without the slightest explanation of prior publication (all it says in the inside cover is “This work resides in the public domain,” though there is a rather cryptic and unexplained year printed beneath the author’s name on the title page), and the publisher’s location is not mentioned anywhere in the book. An odd note on the inside back cover says it was “Made in the USA, San Bernardino, CA”).It took me scarcely a minute on-line to figure out why this “book” appears in the form it does. They have copy-pasted exactly what is available for free on Project Gutenberg. For my extra $8 plus shipping I got that free text in a paperback book form. It otherwise resembles no self-respecting book I have ever seen. The Project Gutenberg formatted table of contents looks ghastly in a book. There are no spaces between the chapter names, which are capitalized, in quotes, underlined, and in exactly the same Gutenberg typewriter font. The paragraphs in the book text itself are set apart not by indentation but by spaces, “business letter” style. It looks very weird. I would gladly have paid double the price I did to get a real book. I am not even sure I want to give this to my daughter now, but living in Central Europe it is hard to find English language books, and summer vacation looms.I have been a satisfied Amazon customer since the company began in the late 1990s, but have learned an important lesson with this experience. This not the first instance I have encountered here what you see being NOT what you get, only the most disappointing. Amazon evidently does not vet what it sells. In the future, I will be more wary of buying a book on Amazon from an unknown publisher that does not offer the “look inside” function. Amazon offers services that few bookstores could hope to match, and my regard for the company’s overall book sales function remains high, but it is clear to me now that continued competition from bookstores serves a very valuable quality control purpose.

⭐ An adventure so extraordinary that it will be mistaken in one month for a dream and, in some years, for a myth. In South America, our old maps had the figure of a dinosaur to mark terras incognitas, unexplored lands (not anymore as by now all has been already explored). I think it’s because The lost World entered our consciousness; dreams and memories liquefy, until feeling them as a shadow of truth, fiction whose stuff could had been originated from rumors and ancient stories.You need to be a kid to fully enjoy this book. As an adult you will find the characters are (cherishable) caricatures, in a small isolated region I suspect the creatures, contrary to what happens in the book, would evolve to be small in size; the scientists drive a species into the brink of utter extinction :S, they seem to not care that much about the dinosaurs as we don’t get to see much and is like Conan Doyle got bored with them so he introduced new characters that actually make the plot mundane. In the positive side natives are treated as adults, with differences, some good and some evil. As a native myself is sad each time all are presented as noble and wise people, an inhumane unidimensionality in my opinion, also the narrated landscape is majestic. And lastly in the side of curiosities professor Challenger is accused to forge photographs to sell an impossible discovery (it’s at the beginning so it’s not a spoiler), I read that Arthur Conan Doyle believed in fairies because a photo of two girls with dancing fairies in a meadow; afterwards it was known that the photo was staged with pieces of paper, a forged photo… I don’t see myself re-reading “The Lost World“ but I am truly happy to have read it, and I am sure you will be happy too : )About the AmazonClassics Edition it has no illustrations, which I understand were present in its first publication, if it matters it depends of personal tastes, usually drawings don’t express what one can imagine so I am fine with their absence. Beyond that this is an excellent edition with X-Ray and a modern and clean formatting, pure text without nosy introductions to spoil the adventure. Highly recommended edition.

⭐ This is obviously a computer translation of a translation (e.g ‘Father in regulation’ for ‘Father in law’). It’s actually kind of funny, or would be if it were free. I have not found one sentence that sounds like grammatical English; Amazon should do a better job checking the content of the books they sell on Kindle.

⭐ “The Lost World” is the quintessential dinosaur-adventure book, and perhaps what started the whole genre of “explorers encounter a land where supposedly-extinct creatures are alive and well” genre… and was possibly even the inspiration for “Jurassic Park” and its many, many copycats. I know Arthur Conan Doyle is more famous for his Sherlock Holmes books and stories, and I’m not a huge “Jurassic Park” fan, but I’m a sucker for a decent dinosaur story, and I was curious as to this early example of the genre. And it was an entertaining adventure… but it certainly shows its age, and has some elements that can be uncomfortable for the modern-day reader.Professor Challenger, a bullheaded and egotistical scholar, has emerged from a trip to the Amazon with a fantastic claim — that he’s found proof of a hidden wilderness within the heart of the jungle where dinosaurs and other prehistoric creatures are alive and well! His claims are disregarded by the scientific community, who immediately make him a laughingstock. Undeterred, Challenger rounds up a band of explorers — a skeptical fellow scholar, a rough-and-tumble Irish explorer, and a nervous but determined newspaper reporter — to return to this hidden world and prove its existence. But when treachery strands the four of them in the jungle just as they rediscover this lost world, their discovery could very well prove to be their doom…As the precursor to an entire genre, “The Lost World” lays the groundwork for many a tale to come after. It’s an entertaining and spirited adventure story, and never really pretends to be anything but that. Its characters are all larger than life, often comical but always entertaining, and the story is full of action and thrills. And there are some actually-beautiful descriptive passages that I enjoyed.The book does stir up some problems when read today, over a century after its publication. This is only to be expected, of course — things have changed greatly over the past hundred years — so it’s important to go into this book remembering that it’s a product of its time. Our knowledge of what dinosaurs were and must have been like has evolved greatly over the years, so some of the descriptions of these creatures are greatly outdated (the descriptions of the T-Rex-ish predator dinosaurs will make any paleontologist of today cringe). And there’s some rather uncomfortable racism in the descriptions of black people and the indigenous tribes of the Amazon… though to be fair, Doyle at least portrays these characters heroically instead of as stock villains or simpletons as much writing of the day did. Credit where credit is due, I suppose.While parts of this book don’t hold up terribly well today, this book is still interesting to read as the founder of a subgenre, and still holds the power to excite and entertain. It’s probably one of the earliest examples of dinosaur-adventure literature, and is both a curiosity and a surprisingly entertaining novel over a century after its publication.

⭐ I bought the Calla hardbound edition and if you want this book forever and plan to read it again and again and pass it on down through your family because you love it and always have this is the edition to buy. It is hardbound with a dusky green material cover with one of Harry Rountree’s wonderful drawings on it. It is heavy because the paper that it’s printed on is super fine heavy stuff. It is a faithful reproduction of the original (which now costs $100) full of beautiful sepia colored Harry Rountree drawings. It is a keeper for always. I paid $26 for mine. It is a book well worth that amount. I am sold on the Calla publishers if this is their normal quality- great stuff. If you haven’t read the story you might want to buy a cheap copy first to make sure it’s your thing. Also it’s not a bed-reading book (too heavy)This is a book for those who have read it and love the tale. If you read it as a child you will love it forever.

⭐ i loved the e-book version of this, the whole story, i really need to read the descriptions better, s this is for children and fit into 64 pages i don’t think it’s the whole story, which i wanted to get for my daughter who is 16 an definitely not in 4th grade,lol

⭐ This is not the original text. Compare the first page or two to (for instance) Google Books pdf. Some passages come across, others are badly mangled. Looks suspiciously like a translation of a translation.I bought another edition with similarly bad text, bought this slightly more expensive version and was disgusted to discover the same problems.I’ve already surrendered the first one, so I can’t compare to confirm they are identical, but the problems were very similar and evident in the first page.

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