The Lost City of Z: A Tale of Deadly Obsession in the Amazon in Ultimate Popsugar Reading Challenge

Dec 31, 2009 Anastasia rated it liked it

Shelves: non-fiction, 2010, historical

I'm not sure, even after having read it, what all the fuss is about. Yes, it is exciting to think that an amazing city of gold and jewels is waiting in the Amazon, covered with vines and guarded by pit vipers, for the rare, intrepid explorer with an out-of-this-world constitution and great social skills . . . but beyond that, I don't know why people rave about this book. The author highlights PH Fawcett, but sporadically and vaguely covers PHF's various trips to the Amazon, leaving out a lot of ...more

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Sep 10, 2013 Sarah rated it really liked it

Shelves: non-fiction, exploration-and-adventure, memoir-and-bio

I love a good adventure story. A lot of it is wealthy white men doing some pretty stupid stuff supposedly in the name of science. I find adventurers a truly interesting bunch. Most of them often too easily classified as egomaniacs. And while there is some of that in many of them, there is also the restlessness and wanderlust that I find appealing too.
This book is mostly about Percy Fawcett, a British explorer who spent a good deal of his time exploring and mapping the Amazon just after the turn ...more

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Nov 10, 2010 Joanna rated it liked it · review of another edition

Shelves: travel, audiobooks, passport, nonfiction, biography-memoir, bookish-2011-winter, 2011-read, rws-2011-spring

The reader for the unabridged audio version did a good, but unremarkable job with this book. The book was interesting, but not amazing. The author inserted information about his personal journey, but not enough to make me interested in the author's own story, but too much to be ignored. If he wanted to tell a travel memoir, I needed more of him. If he just wanted to write a biography, I needed less. I had never heard Fawcett's story before and didn't know about discoveries in the Amazon. The des ...more

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Jul 26, 2018 Beth Given rated it it was ok

Shelves: audio

Yeah ... so adventure stories (even nonfiction ones) aren’t really my jam, I think. Had to switch from ebook to audio halfway through to finish in time for book club. I did learn a lot about how deadly the Amazon is!

Clean readers: only a small handful of swear words, though there are some sickening parts ... I started to tell my thirteen-year-old son about certain flesh-eating critters described in this book and he dry-heaved. 😆

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Feb 04, 2019 Julie rated it really liked it

Shelves: to-read-own

This one started out gangbusters, crazy fascinating! It did slow a bit and I found myself having to push a bit to finish but felt rewarded in the end. So interesting to think about a time when we were still discovering the world. If you are interested in adventure, anthropology, and real travel, definitely check this book out. David Grann is a singular talent!

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