The Lost City of Z: A Tale of Deadly Obsession in the Amazon (2009)

I see there is also a movie full of hotties by this name. Will add it to my TBW list.

The Lost City of Z is a spellbinding triumph that recounts perhaps the most fascinating story from Victorian era exploration and its last great explorer, Percy Fawcett, and his life-long obsession with finding a legendary lost ancient city buried in the heart of the Amazon. Despite his superhuman mental and physical strength and endurance across multiple expeditions, ultimately, the gargantuan mysterious jungle swallowed him whole in the late 1920s, leaving his family and friends—and the entire world—to wonder about his fate--perhaps the most enduring mystery of the age of exploration. Grann plunges us back into this era to answer that question.

Rarely has a book so captivated me at the perfect intersection of my interests — explorers, the Victorian era, and the history of discovery. Victorian exploration and discovery is quite simply my jam.
I know I’m 15 years late to the party here, but Grann’s thoroughbred cracker of a story sets a new standard for me in this genre. I simply could not put it down. I also love how the multiple accounts I've been reading of exploration from this era come together and connect through overlapping characters and stories.

I was captivated by Fawcett’s singular focus on finding El Dorado, and pitied him for the cost to him and his family of his multi-decade quest. I found his wife and sons equally admirable in their own ways as they grew and supported him in his expeditions, even his younger son Brian whom Fawcett did not see fit to follow in his footsteps, but who later in life played an important role in telling his father’s story.

Not only was Fawcett an explorer for the ages, and recognized as such by the Royal Geographical Society for his mapping of great swaths of the unknown interior of South America and her flora, fauna, and people, but he also responded to the call to fight for the British Empire on the Western Front in WWI. Fawcett was “bred by the RGS to be an explorer”.

Grann deserves enormous credit for throwing himself into this story, quite literally, traveling to Brazil to retrace Fawcett’s footsteps in search of clues, as well as for his masterful weaving of Fawcett’s journals and personal correspondence with family, friends, and colleagues with historical and heretofore private accounts of Fawcett’s life.

Fawcett faced unimaginable physical and mental deprivations on his multi-year expeditions, whether by flesh eating insects, pirawnas, bats, snakes, poisonous frogs, jaguars, microbes, isolation, rebellious and unfit colleagues, and of course, the arrows, clubs and blow darts of native inhabitants who tracked his every move and confronted him innumerable times on his journeys. To his credit, he generally played peacemaker with native tribes, and forbade his companies from using force or weapons during those encounters and attacks.

Meanwhile, at home, his faithful wife shared reports of his trials and triumphs with the press and the RGS. She was dutiful and loyal to him her entire life, and I greatly admired her grit amid her personal deprivations.

Their son Jack and Jack’s best friend joined him on his most significant final expedition, and we live vicariously through all of them thanks to Grann’s superb investigative historical journalism and talent spinning a yarn.

I would recommend this book to anyone who loves tales of adventure, exploration, and discovery and who enjoys learning about the hearty and dedicated souls from eras gone by. ( )

Very readable and interesting ( )

bookbox; Glad I read The River of Doubt first - it gave a good background on what the rainforest was really like. Grann's book is more about the Geographical society and explorers in the Amazon, as well as Percy Fawcett's life. I never heard of him, nor much about exploring and mapping the Amazon. Fawcett was convinced that there was a lost city, and compared to Roosevelt, he packed much lighter. Although that still didn't help. He never returned from his last exploration, but he was in his late 50s and in the jungle that the indigenous Indians protected, with quite an array of poisons ( )

A great mix of narrative and insightful writing that make this an enjoyable non-fiction. I also appreciated the author giving an account of his own obsession which added to narrative style. But, it also proves the biographies are influenced by the thoughts of the writer as well. ( )