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Back Jungle Up Save as PDF
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  63. Author’s Note

For the next few months, as I absorbed innumerable books, movies, documentaries, and articles about the Amazon jungle, three distinctive themes emerged: people in search of lost ruins in the Amazon, people in search of new medicines/drugs in the Amazon, and people in search of other people who had gone missing in the Amazon.

From there, the story started to take shape, but I still needed that special twist.

There is always one moment (at least in my experience) of pure book magic that happens in the creation of a story. This moment happened when I was researching what pharmaceutical drugs were the most profitable. The list I found was from 2017, and the number one top-selling drug was Humira (AbbVie, 2017 sales: $18.4 billion), the number four top-selling drug was Enbrel (Amgen & Pfizer, 2017 sales: $7.9 billion), and the number seven top-selling drug was Remicade (Johnson & Johnson and Merck & Co, 2017 sales: $7.2 billion.) There was one thing all three of these medications had in common: they all treated autoimmune disease.

I then researched a list of autoimmune diseases and there it was among the many others, the very disease that Thomas’s sister suffers from: Multiple sclerosis.

Pure book magic :)

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I took substantial literary license with Incas, Paititi, Bolivia, the Amazon jungle, dengue fever, documentary filmmaking, anthropology, archaeology, ethnobotany, cancer, autoimmune disease, and countless other story elements. Any errors or omissions in the story are mine and mine alone.

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I could never have written this book or reached the finish line without the help of an extraordinary group of people.

Special thanks to author Douglas Preston, whose book The Lost City of the Monkey God became a roadmap for my fictitious documentary expedition.

Enormous thanks to archaeologist Chris Fisher, PhD—who was part of the Monkey God expedition in Honduras and just happens to be a professor at my alma mater, Colorado State University—for sharing his time, expertise, and friendship. Chris is currently undertaking an unprecedented scientific effort to lidar scan the entire surface of the Earth. (You can learn more at www.TheEarthArchive.com.)

My thanks to ethnobotanist and author Mark J. Plotkin, PhD. I relied heavily on his incredible book Tales of a Shaman’s Apprentice: An Ethnobotanist Searches for New Medicines in the Amazon Rain Forest.

A big, warm thank-you to my first reader, my mom, who read the book no less than five times and provided invaluable insights and recommendations with each draft.

A heartfelt thanks to my beta readers, Nelda Hirsh, Kari Miller, and Dori Rauschenberger, who each made invaluable contributions to the story.

Special thanks to Dana Isaacson. This was my first experience working with a developmental editor, and I am beyond grateful for Dana’s fantastic suggestions.

My sincere thanks to my literary team, Danny Baror and Heather Baror, for their diligence and for finding a home for the Thomas Prescott series.