The Lost City of Z

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.

What do you know of The Amazon? Rainforests? Tribes of primitive Indians? Dangerous insects and animals? Think again. That is only a minute part of the story and, in the case of the Indians, entirely wrong.

Author David Grann brings us the story of the mysterious disappearance of the English explorer Col. Percy Harrison Fawcett, the last of the Victorian pioneer explorers who, armed with little more than a machete and a gut instinct, mapped large parts of the unexplored world.

Fawcett's forte was exploring the Amazon. He definitively mapped the Bolivian/Brazilian border; he penetrated into areas no white man had gone before; he became obsessed with finding a lost city which would prove that a lost civilisation once existed within the harsh jungle environment of the Amazon.

Grann relates a gripping tale of human endurance under extreme conditions. Fawcett, in his time, was as famous as any modern day movie star, his exploits reported around the world. But his obsession with ‘Z' would lead to bankruptcy, and flirtations with occultism. Eventually he would seemingly vanish off the face of the earth as he, his son Jack and Jack's best friend Raleigh, tried once last expedition into the green hell of the Amazon.

Grann also tells of the rescue missions that came after Fawcett's disappearance. Of the bizarre cults that grew up, each with their own fantastic theory on Fawcett's vanishing act. Eventually even the author is drawn into the Amazon to try and find the truth. I won't spoil the ending by revealing what he found, but I will say that this is a page turner of a book, about a man who endured much in the name of exploration.