Book Review : The Lost World by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle (Rating *****)

The book is a good example of scientific classic which survived a hundred years. In the crowded world of millions of books published and then forgotten in the darkness of libraries, some shine like a star and survive for centuries. This book is similar one written by the famous author Sir Arthur Conan Doyle famous for Sherlock Holmes in the year 1912.The author was charismatic in his ideas as we can see the stories of Sherlock Holmes and his ways of cracking crimes still amuses people.

In the year 1912, when the Europe was a boiling pot ripe for two great wars and was riding on great colonialization experience and exploration of new worlds. It was not surprise that everyone was in search of wealthy India or el dorado in south America. The fossils of the Jurassic era were new and a lot of theories were prevailing regarding evolution of earth and man. The idea that the creatures that ruled the earth millions of year ago could still be surviving somewhere in the darkness of Amazon jungle was futuristic. Enthralled by this idea people have gone on various expeditions in the unknown and perished. A very few survived to tell their stories of wild adventures.

Amazon rain forest as it stands even today as the least explored and hostile area on the earth. Many mysteries lay hidden in its dense forests. Due to heavy uncontrolled deforestation by greedy humans these will vanish in next 100 years. The story imagines that some creatures from Jurassic era are survived in an exclusion zone or plateau in the depths of Amazon forests which is discovered by Professor Challenger, an eccentric zoologist. The hero of the story, a press reporter Malone along with other friends venture into Amazon to explore this plateau. The most of book is written in a reportage format as reported by a journalist.

The story written long back also revived by recent dinosaur movies which depict realistic nature of those awesome creatures to everybody. I was myself wanted to read this book only after seeing the movie. The concept of dinosaurs that lived millions of years ago and then vanished suddenly making way for weaker mammals and consequently human beings is very exciting. From small child to an adult, everyone want to know about them. The story of the book is different from movies and only roughly followed in the web series of the same name.

Unlike other books of Victorian era that I found difficult to read due a different type of English, words and accent, this book is surprisingly simple and easy to read. Writing style of Mr. Doyle is excellent and makes a very good at story telling, a quality possessed by a very few authors. The book is written in simple English and needs very little help from dictionary to understand some difficult words. The scientific theory and terminology used  is quite good and is not very exaggerated.

A few people know that Mr. Doyle is associated with many other books than Sherlock Holmes. The Sherlock Holmes series have overshadowed his other beautiful creations. Thanks to todays digital age where we can read any classical book online almost freely at project Gutenberg or with some premium on Amazon Kindle, otherwise all this work would have died in the darkness of government libraries waiting to be read.