Interesting. Not sure its "rollicking" or reads with the pace of a movie thriller as the cover states. But another fascinating chapter in the tales of British explorers hubris reaping mayhem and death. How does an explorer keep loosing most of his team and get cheered as a hero? Beware if you are squeamish about sharing your body with maggots. ( )

Amazon history non-fiction ( )

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. ( )

Grann's first book demonstrates that he hasn't quite found his stride yet, but his incipient gifts are visible. Here he explores (pun intended) the life and career of the intrepid, merciless obsessive Percy Fawcett, who combs the "green hell" of the Amazonian jungle during the early years of the 20th century (his stint in the trenches of WWI was apparently not enough excitement for him) in search of a mythical (or is it?) ancient city, known only as "Z." For months and years, he hacks his way through an environment which seems determined to kill you every way possible: the bugs all carry poison (and so do a lot of the plants), the snakes can swallow a deer whole, tiny fish armed with barbs slither up bodily orifices, every scrape and cut can go infected and gangrenous; there is little food to be had, and you ARE the food for piranhas. And yet there are stories of a great city of thousands, a network of broad highways, scraps of delicate and elaborate ceramics. Fawcett is determined to find it, and damn the costs. Many die miserably under his flag. His reports to the world of his adventures captivate people across the globe. He sets off in 1925 with his twenty-something son Jack and Jack's best friend Raleigh, for yet another foray. And they all vanish.

Their disappearance triggers a second wave of public fascination, leading to multiple expeditions - authorized and not - deep into Brazil to try to find him, or at least discover what happened to him. For decades, there are rumors of a ragged old tall white man living alone in the jungle, or among native tribes. More people die in these efforts. And Grann himself, by now pretty darn obsessed himself, heads for the Amazon. Spoiler: he does meet and speak with an old woman in a village who was a little girl when the three white men appeared, and saw them walk off in the direction of some hills in the distance. They have drifted into myth themselves - the locals have stories about them, and most think "bad Indians" probably kidnapped and/or killed them. Grann also manages to find archeologist Michael Heckenberger, living in a hut in a village not far away. Heckenberger is in the process of uncovering a massive complex of moats, palisades, plazas, and causeways, peppered with ceramic shards from a thousand years before. It is conceivable that Fawcett almost made it. Almost.

The tale crosses continents, oceans, jungles, mighty rivers, and many decades. It can ramble, jump back and forth in time, from a waist-deep swamp to an upscale sporting goods store; Grann inserts himself at moments when you might prefer to stick with the drama of the starving, feverish, suffering explorers. But he evokes the sense of that drama, of people up against unimaginable misery, against nature at her most overwhelming, who choose to undergo, resist, commit, or simply survive terrible things, that you can't quite look away. I was left mostly with a sense of sadness, the poignancy of Fawcett's failure, the ramifications for his family, the horror of the effects of European arrivals on the indigenous people... it is likely that those sophisticated, thriving metropolises in the jungle disappeared because (1) the people built from wood, not stone, which all rotted away and (2) because those people who built them were massacred or died in droves from the diseases brought in by the colonialists. Tragedy all the way around. ( )

Good exploration and survival story. ( )