{"product_id":"9781453508510","title":"The Man Who Found The Maya: John Lloyd Stephens","description":"Starting as a typical tourist, John Lloyd Stephens developed  \u003cbr\u003einto an adventurous traveler and popular author, hailed as  \u003cbr\u003eour greatest travel writer. Then he blossomed into an intrepid  \u003cbr\u003eexplorer who found over forty sites of the virtually forgotten Maya,  \u003cbr\u003epioneering archaeology in the Americas and rescuing from obscurity  \u003cbr\u003ea lost civilization. His incredible travels, first in Europe, the Near East  \u003cbr\u003eand the Holy Land, and then in the jungles of Central America and  \u003cbr\u003eMexico, mark him as a kind of nineteenth-century Indiana Jones.  \u003cbr\u003eHow he transformed from the wandering tourist who scrawled his  \u003cbr\u003ename on ancient monuments to the dedicated discoverer whose  \u003cbr\u003etheories about the Maya were often years ahead of the scholars is as  \u003cbr\u003efascinating as the exploits he chronicled in his books.  \u003cbr\u003eBased largely on Stephens' own writings, this biography presents  \u003cbr\u003ethe man in the widely different settings that marked his colorful  \u003cbr\u003ecareer - the society of his beloved nineteenth-century New York,  \u003cbr\u003ethe forbidding desert of Arabia, plague-ridden Constantinople, and  \u003cbr\u003ethe uncharted mountains and steaming jungles where the hidden  \u003cbr\u003eMaya temples and cities lay under centuries of almost impenetrable  \u003cbr\u003evegetation. Readers will see through Stephens' eyes the hieroglyphic  \u003cbr\u003ecovered temples of ancient Luxor, the hidden city of Petra, carved out  \u003cbr\u003eof living rock, and the moment he comes upon the walls of Copan,  \u003cbr\u003eone of the great moments in archaeology. From his childhood in a  \u003cbr\u003ebooming young New York City, to his years as a lawyer dabbling  \u003cbr\u003ein politics, to his travels and his four successful books about those  \u003cbr\u003etravels, to his subsequent career as a businessman, Stephens was a  \u003cbr\u003efascinating figure and an interesting one to read about.  \u003cbr\u003eSTEVEN FRIMMER is a retired editor, with more than thirty years  \u003cbr\u003eexperience in book publishing, and is the author of three previously  \u003cbr\u003epublished books on archaeology.","brand":"Xlibris Corporation","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":47124271202544,"sku":"9781453508510","price":9.99,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0737\/7593\/9824\/files\/9781453508510_p0.jpg?v=1763847791","url":"https:\/\/shop-qa.barnesandnoble.com\/products\/9781453508510","provider":"Barnes \u0026 Noble (DEV)","version":"1.0","type":"link"}