The Lost City of Z
By David Grann
(Vintage, Paperback, 9781400078455, January 2010, 448pp.)

The Short of It:

A well-researched treat for the armchair traveler.

The Rest of It:

In 1925, Percival Harrison Fawcett and his eldest son, disappeared on an expedition to find the lost city of “Z”, his name for an uncharted city in the dense jungles of the Amazon. The trip was well-documented by Fawcett himself, but the facts leading up to his disappearance were sketchy enough for explorers everywhere to take a stab at what actually happened. Here, David Grann, a journalist, attempts to unravel the mystery surrounding Fawcett’s disappearance while interspersing his own stories and experiences of visiting the Amazon.

Before reading this book,  I had no idea who Fawcett was. So I was quite surprised at how many explorers have gone out into the Amazon looking for him, only to fail or be killed while trying. Grann, who is definitely not an explorer, but a journalist, gives us a well-researched, methodical account of  Fawcett’s trip. Using Fawcett’s journals and accounts from other explorers, he pieces together that fateful trip. The only problem, and something nearly everyone in my book club noticed, is that Fawcett could have written anything he wanted. Just how accurate were those papers?

The pacing of this book was a tad slow at times and often repetitive since many of the occurrences (parasitic attacks, malaria, etc.) repeat themselves throughout the telling. Overall, I felt as if I were part of the adventure and I do believe that is what Grann intended when he wrote the book. Some of the book club members felt that it could have been edited down a bit. I felt that way as well, but by the end of the book, I understood that Grann was attacking it from all sides and addressing different viewpoints so the extra bit of detail he included, didn’t keep me from enjoying the book.

I was worried that there wouldn’t be enough to discuss but I worried for nothing. Here are some little known facts about Fawcett as noted from Wikipedia:

• Arthur Conan Doyle based his Professor Challenger character partly on Fawcett, and stories of the “Lost City of Z” became the basis for his novel The Lost World.^[15]
• Fawcett has been proposed as a possible inspiration for Indiana Jones, the fictional archaeologist/adventurer.^[16][17] A fictionalised version of Fawcett aids Jones in the novel Indiana Jones and the Seven Veils.^[18])
• According to an article in Comics Scene #45, Fawcett was the inspiration of Kent Allard, an alter ego of the Shadow.^[9]
• Aloysius Pendergast, a fictional FBI special agent from the novels by Douglas Preston and Lincoln Child, is a Fawcett’s great-great nephew.

There were rumblings of a movie in the works with Brad Pitt backing it, but that rumor seems to have petered out.

Readers who enjoy adventure will appreciate this book, as will anyone who appreciates thorough research and tales of obsession.

Note from Ti: The ‘ick” factor in this one is probably a 5 on a scale of 1-10 with 10 being extremely icky. There are maggots and open, oozing sores and casual mentions of cannibalism involving babies but these parts are not overly graphic. Just mentions.

Source: Borrowed
Disclosure: This post contains Indiebound affiliate links.