The Lost City of Z
A Tale of Deadly Obsession in the Amazon
Ratings72
Average rating3.7
15
A Tale of Deadly Obsession in the Amazon
Ratings72
Average rating3.7
After stumbling upon a hidden trove of diaries, acclaimed New Yorker writer David Grann set out to solve "the greatest exploration mystery of the twentieth century": What happened to the British explorer Percy Fawcett and his quest for the Lost City of Z?
In 1925, Fawcett ventured into the Amazon to find an ancient civilization, hoping to make one of the most important discoveries in history. For centuries Europeans believed the world’s largest jungle concealed the glittering kingdom of El Dorado. Thousands had died looking for it, leaving many scientists convinced that the Amazon was truly inimical to humankind. But Fawcett, whose daring expeditions helped inspire Conan Doyle’s The Lost World, had spent years building his scientific case. Captivating the imagination of millions around the globe, Fawcett embarked with his twenty-one-year-old son, determined to prove that this ancient civilization – which he dubbed "Z" – existed. Then he and his expedition vanished.
Fawcett’s fate—and the tantalizing clues he left behind about "Z" –became an obsession for hundreds who followed him into the uncharted wilderness. For decades scientists and adventurers have searched for evidence of Fawcett’s party and the lost City of Z. Countless have perished, been captured by tribes, or gone mad. As David Grann delved ever deeper into the mystery surrounding Fawcett’s quest, and the greater mystery of what lies within the Amazon, he found himself, like the generations who preceded him, drawn into the jungle’s "green hell." His quest for the truth, and his stunning discoveries about Fawcett’s fate and "Z," form the heart of this enthralling narrative.
Reviews with the most likes.
A lost city. A missing explorer. This book screams for instant success.
Instead I'm shelving it at the 100 page mark. The premise is interesting, but the execution was surprisingly poor. It kept alternating between nonfiction and fiction style writing. True enough, the author did an incredible amount of research for the Faucet portion. It was the author's own chapters of his adventure that bored me. I would have enjoyed this much more if the story of faucet had been at the beginning and the author's story followed suit. Jumping between the two timelines was confusing and made it difficult to get into. I am still intrigued by faucet's journey and would love to see a movie based upon it. Sadly this book just needed to be shelved.
Think I will slot this one into the “Read a Travel Memoir” category for the 2017 Read Harder Challenge, although it's a travel memoir wrapped around the story of one of the last great British explorers, Percy Fawcett. The author attempts to discover the fate of Fawcett, who was obsessed with finding the Lost City of Z (or, El Dorado) and disappeared while doing so. Good riddance to the age of the great white explorer, I say, since invariably these obsessions wrecked families, triggered ecological disasters, and decimated native populations.
Couldn't put it down. Real life Indiana Jones adventure with the investigative spirit of The Orchid Thief.
I really wanted to like this book, a lot. It has had so much fantastic press, and I've read a lot of great fiction and nonfiction set in the Amazon lately. However, the set up was just so disorganized. Grann tries to interweave the narratives of Percy Fawcett, the great Amazon explorer; subsequent expeditions looking for Fawcett and his own journey to the Amazon. This intertwining dilutes all three of the stories and is confusing to jump among. In addition, he discusses precise locations in the Amazon, but none of them are actually labelled on the map in the frontispiece.
The whole thing was so frustrating, because there actually is a really interesting story about survival, exploration and the age in which we knew so little about the world and had so few resources, but human curiosity drove us to investigate anyway. I wish that Grann had avoided the overdone move of going on his own Amazon expedition – it really didn't add to the story and the “denouement” in which he discovered “Z” was really him just meeting up with an archeologist from the University of Florida, who shared his research, which had already been published, anyway.
I did enjoy reading about the different Amazonian tribes and their beliefs, but wish that this book had been written by any actual expert (perhaps said Florida archeologist?) rather than a twee amateur.
