By Sir Arthur Conan Doyle

I bought this in a thrift store for $1.99. Later, upon closer inspection of the front cover, I realized I could a have bought this new at Walmart for 1/4 the price. As a bonus, I discovered a purple sticky note on the back page reminding the former reader that, “Rent…By Friday.”

Although I have the complete Sherlock Holmes library, and am currently reading Doyle’s The Great Boer War; I had no idea that this book existed. This book could be described as Jurassic Park before Michael Crichton’s Jurassic Park. Crichton actually has a book called, The lost World, and though it addresses the issue of modern living dinosaurs, it is not based on Doyle’s novel.

In Doyle’s novel a young journalist, hoping to impress a woman he is courting, sets out on an adventure to prove the absurd claims of the controversial Professor Challenger, that a remote plateau in South America contains real living dinosaurs.

They and two other travelers reach this plateau, and adventure, including the apparent genocide of a race of ape-like men, ensues. It is a classic Victorian adventure/science fiction tale in the vein of Jules Verne, tinged with the same belief in the superiority of the British people and empire, that I have found in his other work.