A stirring tale of lost civilizations, avarice, madness and
everything else that makes exploration so much fun.As New Yorker
staff writer and debut author Grann notes, the British explorer
Percy Fawcett's exploits in jungles and atop mountains inspired
novels such as Arthur Conan Doyle's The Lost World, and his
character is the tutelary spirit of the Indiana Jones franchise.
Fawcett in turn was nurtured by his associations with fabulists
such as Doyle and H. Rider Haggard, whose talisman he bore into the
Amazonian rainforest. Working from a buried treasure in the form of
long-lost diaries, Grann reconstructs the 1925 voyage Fawcett
undertook with his 21-year-old son to find the supposed Lost City
of Z, which, by all accounts, may have been El Dorado, the fabled
place of untold amounts of Inca gold. Many a conquistador had died
looking for the place, though in their wake, "after a toll of death
and suffering worthy of Joseph Conrad, most archaeologists had
concluded that El Dorado was no more than a delusion." Fawcett was
not among them, nor was his rival, a rich American doctor named
Alexander Hamilton Rice, who was hot on the trail. Fawcett
determined that a small expedition would be more likely to survive
than a large one. Perhaps so, but the expedition notes record a
hell of humid swamps and "flesh and carrion-eating bees [and] gnats
in clouds rendering one's food unpalatable by filling it with their
filthy bodies, their bellies red and disgustingly distended with
one's own blood." It would get worse, we imagine, before Fawcett
and his party disappeared, never to be seen again. Though, as Grann
writes, they were ironically close to the object of their quest.A
colorful tale of true adventure, marked by satisfyingly unexpected
twists, turns and plenty of dark portents. (Kirkus Reviews)
Colonel Percy Harrison Fawcett was the last of a breed of great
British explorers who ventured into 'blank spots' on the map with
little more than a machete, a compass and unwavering sense of
purpose. In 1925, one of the few remaining blank spots in the world
was in the Amazon. Fawcett believed the impenetrable jungle held a
secret to a large, complex civilization like El Dorado, which he
christened the 'City of Z'. When he and his son set out to find it,
hoping to make one of the most important archeological discoveries
in history, they warned that none should follow them in the event
that they did not return. They vanished without a trace. For the
next eighty years, hordes of explorers -- shocked that a man many
deemed invincible could disappear in a land he knew better than
anyone, and drawn by the centuries-old myth of El Dorado --
searched for the expedition and the city. Many died from
starvation, disease, attacks by wild animals, and poisonous arrows.
Others simply vanished. In The Lost City of Z, David Grann ventures
into the hazardous wild world of the Amazon to retrace the
footsteps of the great Colonel Fawcett and his followers, in a
bracing attempt to solve one of the greatest mysteries. It is an
irresistibly readable adventure story, a subtle examination of the
strange and often violent encounters between Europeans and
Amazonian tribes and a tale of lethal obsession.
General
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