The Enchanted Quest of Dana and Ginger Lamb

by Julie Huffman-Klinkowitz, Jerome Klinkowitz

Best-selling authors, sensational lecturers, documentary filmmakers, amateur archaeologists, spies for FDR--Dana and Ginger Lamb led the life of Indiana Jones long before the movie icon was ever scripted. "We blaze the trail," Ginger said, "and the scientists follow." The Enchanted Quest of Dana and Ginger Lamb is the first biography of this captivating, entrepreneurial couple. In Southern California, they started married life in 1933 by building a canoe. With only $4.10 in their pockets, they paddled to Central America and through the Panama Canal. Three years later they returned triumphant, bearing a photographic record of the amazing trek that made them famous. After releasing their best-selling book, Enchanted Vagabonds , the two became exactly that. They relentlessly lectured for the public and mooned for the media until they were able to fund more exotic voyages to remote jungles and rivers. So convincing were they on the circuit that their most powerful fan, President Franklin Roosevelt, coerced J. Edgar Hoover into hiring the Lambs as spies in Mexico. After World War II they launched their Quest for the Lost City, which yielded another book and documentary. Drawing on historical records, the Lambs' books and letters, and recently declassified espionage documents, biographers Julie Huffman-klinkowitz and Jerome Klinkowitz show how the Lambs succeeded in marketing their conquests and films to armchair explorers around the world and how they became, in popular imagination, the quintessential American adventurers.

240 pages, Hardcover

First published December 19, 2005

Reviews

[Beth · Rating 5 out of 5]

I read this after reading both of the books the Lambs had penned about their extraordinary journeys up and down the coast and through the jungles of Latin America. This is a well researched and well written addition to their legacy of adventure that objectively answered many of the questions I had about Dana and Ginger Lamb. They are so unique and their history so compelling!

[DropOfOcean · Rating 3 out of 5]

If you have read both famous books of Lambs then this is bit tiring to read as it repeats much of the stuff from those books with some additional comment/research. Maybe it’s just me but I lost interest on Lambs once I realized how much of their story was fabricated. This book doesn’t make them any more interesting, it has quite the opposite effect.

[Elise · Rating 3 out of 5]

I picked this up on a whim from the travel section at Half Price Books based on the blurb. In the 30s Dana and Ginger Lamb decided to travel from California to the Panama Canal for their honeymoon....in a canoe. It took them 3 years and when they came back they were celebrities. They spent most of their lives after either traveling in Mexico or doing lecture tours across America about their adventures. They weren't really treasure hunters or anthropologists, but they tirelessly self promoted themselves, sometimes with odd effect.
For example they met Eleanor Roosevelt's brother who introduced them to FDR. He told Hoover to hire them to gather intelligence on Nazi spies in Mexico ( after Pearl Harbor). So the FBI bankrolled them for a while until Hoover realized they were just stringing along for traveling money to look for Mayan ruins instead of Nazi spies.
They also claimed to have found a lost city, but it had been found by several explorers before them. The book was interesting for some of the travel details, but not that well written.