The Lost City of Z: A Tale of Deadly Obsession in the Amazon in History is Not Boring

Oct 18, 2014 Jim rated it it was amazing

Shelves: latin-america, adventure, peru, travel-classics, history

This book was recommended to me by a trek guide/consultant I had met in Cusco, Peru. I have always been fascinated by the Amazon, despite knowing that I am unlikely to ever want to go there -- what with all the insects, diseases, and heat/humidity -- a kind of trifecta of everything I hate.

This book begins with a expedition to the Amazon in the 1920s by Percy Harrison Fawcett to discover a lost urban civilization which he referred to as "The Lost City of Z." All three members of the expedition - This book was recommended to me by a trek guide/consultant I had met in Cusco, Peru. I have always been fascinated by the Amazon, despite knowing that I am unlikely to ever want to go there -- what with all the insects, diseases, and heat/humidity -- a kind of trifecta of everything I hate.

This book begins with a expedition to the Amazon in the 1920s by Percy Harrison Fawcett to discover a lost urban civilization which he referred to as "The Lost City of Z." All three members of the expedition -- Fawcett, his son Jack, and his son's friend Raleigh -- disappeared without a trace and were never heard from again.

On another level, we see various expeditions in search of the lost expedition. The author of The Lost City of Z: A Tale of Deadly Obsession in the Amazon, David Grann, speculates that over a hundred people had lost their lives in expeditions which set out to find what happened to Fawcett.

Finally, Grann himself goes in search of the elusive explorer. He does notfind what happened to Fawcett or his companions, but he actually finds what could have been the so-called "Lost City of Z." As things frequently turn out, what Fawcett was looking for was not quite what he could have expected to find: There were no high cities of stone such as the Incas, Aztecs, and Mayans erected, mainly because there was no easily obtained supply of stone to be quarried. In the last chapter, Grann confers with Michael Heckenberger, an archeologist who lives in the Xingu reserve, who demonstrates the ultimate folly of Fawcett's assumptions. At one point, Grann quotes Fawcett's other son, Brian:

Brian wrote in his diary, "Was Daddy's whole conception of 'Z,' a spiritual objective, and the manner of reaching it a religious allegory?" Was it possible [Grann continues] that three lives had been lost for "an objective that had never existed"? Fawcett himself had scribbled in a letter to a friend, "Those whom the Gods intend to destroy they first make mad!"

What makes this book such an excellent read is that it deals with human frailty at a level not usually discussed in books about such overt adventurers as Fawcett and other explorers. Some of these explorers, such as Hiram Bingham, he "discoverer" of Machu Picchu, walk away with all the prizes. Others, like Fawcett and his companions die lonely deaths in remote places -- such that even their bones are lost to history.

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Apr 27, 2017 Louis rated it it was amazing

History writers are not supposed to get too close to their subjects. Same for science writers. Too risky: it can eliminate the author's ability to be impartial and look at the evidence fairly. Fortunately, David Grann ignored this rule when he learned of the final voyage of British explorer Percy Fawcett. A swashbuckling character worthy of an adventure series, Fawcett led several early 20th-century expeditions to find an ancient civilization in the Amazon which he named Z. Inability to find his ...more

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Jun 14, 2013 Pang rated it really liked it · review of another edition

Shelves: history, nonfiction, around-the-world-in-80-books

What possess a person to go into the Amazon knowing that it's crawling with diseases and creatures that could kill you? That I don't know. But I can't say I blame anyone who wants to be "the first" to do anything. "Every quest, we are led to believe, has a romantic origin."

I've never heard of Z nor of Percy Fawcett, but after reading this book I want to know what happened to him, too! He sounds like a fascinating man. Born in 1867 and a military man, "he was the last of the great Victorian explo What possess a person to go into the Amazon knowing that it's crawling with diseases and creatures that could kill you? That I don't know. But I can't say I blame anyone who wants to be "the first" to do anything. "Every quest, we are led to believe, has a romantic origin."

I've never heard of Z nor of Percy Fawcett, but after reading this book I want to know what happened to him, too! He sounds like a fascinating man. Born in 1867 and a military man, "he was the last of the great Victorian explorers who ventured into an unchartered realms with a little more than a machete, a compass, and almost a divine sense of purpose." He became obsessed with the Amazon after his expeditions to redraw Bolivia-Brazil border. He was convinced "that an ancient, highly cultured people still existed in the Brazilian Amazon and that their civilization was so old and so sophisticated it would forever alter the Western view of the Americas" (since then, and even now, we didn't know much about the various Indian tribes, but we simply just classified them as "salvages.") So he named this lost world the City of Z.

At time of his fateful expedition in 1925, he was said that "although his hair was thinning and his mustache was flecked with white, he was so fit that he could walk for days with little, if any, rest or nourishment." People talked about how he'd battle anaconda, piranhas, and other jungle creatures and survived to tell it. So if anyone was able to find this Lost City of Z, it would be Fawcett, the Royal Geographic Society believed. Just look at his picture, he seems like nothing could shake him up! He reminded me of Curly from City Slickers: "Did you see how leathery he was? He was like a saddlebag with eyes!"
Percy Fawcett

Everything about the Amazon just doesn't sound appealing to me. There was vampire fish that made piranha sounded like kitten. There was a pit viper, one of the most venomous snakes in the Americas: one bite will cause a person to bleed from the eyes and become a corpse piece-by-piece. And you could get maggots growing under your skin and die. Oh, goody. Sounds delightful - sign me up!

Obviously it takes a certain kind of person and certain kind of personality to desire for an Amazon adventure, knowing what lies ahead. But this is not like camping in your local state forest preserve, this is sleeping in a hammock with all sort of things that want to eat you alive watching you. And we're talking about the early 1920s when the expedition took place. There was zero modern amenity and gadget! You had to have skills - real skills, like how to make a pillow out of mud, as Fawcett had. Or how to make friend with cannibal Indian tribe without breaking down and crying like a little girl. But yet the Amazon attracted, and continuing to attract, all sort of explorers and expeditions. There are oil and rubber, those are money to be made. Plus the dream of finding El Dorado.

I know I wouldn't last a day, but I get the obsession especially when there wasn't a lot of places left unexplored when Fawcett made his fateful expedition. To emerge from the Amazon victorious for the second time, when hundreds had perished, would certainly make him a bigger hero than he was already. Your name is forever etched into history. But anthropologists have different opinions on whether the Amazon could support massive population, let alone a "sophisticated civilization." Some say no way, while others are more optimistic. And if you're a scientist, wouldn't you want to risk it to prove it once and for all?! I could see it. I get it.

They typically have one common thread: obsession. They are about ordinary people driven to do extraordinary things — things that most of us would never dare — who get some germ of an idea in their heads that metastasizes until it consumes them.

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Apr 27, 2010 Sheila rood rated it it was amazing

Was skeptical that a non-fiction book about the Amazon and yet another explorer could hold my interest. Boy was I in for an exciting and informative read. Every chapter read like a fictional mystery but was factual.
A must read for anyone interested in the world and nature .

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May 04, 2009 Mike Petty rated it really liked it

Shelves: adventure

I was looking forward to reading this book ever since my brother told me about it (from what little you can glean from a Steven Colbert interview) and I won't say that I was at all disappointed, but it wasn't the page-turner that others on goodreads led me to believe it was. Granted, we all have different tastes, but this book is right up my alley.

Still, I did find it extremely interesting and thorough, covering a subject I was wholly unaware of previously. Its portrait of a classic Victorian e ...more

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Jun 15, 2009 Nicholas rated it it was amazing

When I was a senior in high school, my English teacher once asked, "If you could live in any time period, which would it be?" She listened quite raptly to students as they explained where and when they would want to be, and when she came to me, she cut me off, saying "I bet you'd want to live in the future, Nick." I guess it was all the Orwell and Bradbury I was carrying around, but I couldn't help but feel annoyed. The truth was, in fact, that I'd much rather have lived in the past. To a certai When I was a senior in high school, my English teacher once asked, "If you could live in any time period, which would it be?" She listened quite raptly to students as they explained where and when they would want to be, and when she came to me, she cut me off, saying "I bet you'd want to live in the future, Nick." I guess it was all the Orwell and Bradbury I was carrying around, but I couldn't help but feel annoyed. The truth was, in fact, that I'd much rather have lived in the past. To a certain degree, I guess that's still true, and for pretty much the same reason: I love adventure. In the world of GPS and satellite imagery, there is hardly a single square meter that hasn't been mapped, identified and catalogued on the entire planet (barring undersea), which kind of takes the mystery and hope out of the world just a little. It removes the idea of the exotic, as ethnocentric as that may seem from a post-modernist world view. I think one of the major things modern society suffers from is an insatiable desire, and no outlet for, adventure and discovery, which compels us to live vicariously through others and through entertainment, which are about the only places (except, I guess if you're an astronaut) you can find "undiscovered" country.

What I loved most about Grann's Lost City of Z is that it contains cultural commentary just like the anecdote above with some serious amateur history and investigative work into a really glamorous, if you're a Westerner, period of exploration and discovery. I think there is really something to be said about journalists doing historian work. Unlike historians, both modern and ancient, journalists understand the concept of writing for an audience that is not buried nose-deep in the terminology and technicalities of their profession. Z is very well-written, and Grann follows a pretty typical narrative structure, recounting both Percy Fawcett's life and eventual disappearance into the Amazon in search of a lost civilization and his own personal account of his own formative experiences, his research, and eventually his own trip into the Amazon, which ends up being suspenseful, humorous, and academic without being overly stuffy. I flipped pretty excitedly through the pages of this book as Grann touched my own inner child, and I began to get that same feeling that I had when watching an Indiana Jones movie (the old trilogy, not the Crystal Skull alien nonsense).

As I grew older, my love of history and discovery and anthropology and archeology was tempered by the realization that there were no grand, earthshattering, paradigm shifting discoveries left to be made. And that the life of a historian was far less glamorous than that of Indy. I love history. I find people fascinating. I find their stories, however mundane, as long as they are different from my own, fascinating. The Lost City of Z rekindled in me the fire to go out and discover. To research. To explore. And it's an amazing feeling. Seldom does a book give you a feeling, a glow, that transforms your character, and I believe that this is one.

Percy Fawcett's story is tragic, but romantic. A Victorian Age explorer, shedding the cultural constraints of English society and pursuing treasure and notoriety as a man among men, able to endure the world's harshest environment in the name of science and to simply challenge the unknown. Fawcett's life is filled with amazing coincidence, and even more amazing stories, making him seem like Indiana Jones come to life. Grann really did his homework and, as much as this book focuses on a mystery (What exactly happened to Fawcett on his last expedition into the Amazon from which he disappeared, never to be heard from again?), to his credit, Grann never allows for self-indulgence and inventiveness. A difficult task for any biographer or historian who sets out to KNOW, and find answers.

Even more surprising, there is some brilliant research and archeological findings presented toward the end of the book, where Fawcett's ultimate fate is discussed, that is really fascinating. A wealth of new research suggests that many of the legends of advanced civilizations in the heart of the Amazon (El Dorado's and the like), really aren't so far fetched. All historians love to indulge in the idea that there is some unknown branch of civilization, completely undiscovered, super advanced, that would completely change everything we thought we knew about humanity and historical development. The exciting thing about recent years in South American research, is that that hope, that fantasy even, is probably true. Screw Atlantis. Z is real, mostly, and though it's not made of solid gold and they don't have advanced alien technology, pre-Colombian Amazonian society was complex, vibrant and much, much more advanced than has ever been thought since Europeans first made contact almost 500 years ago.

This book is very readable for the non-historian, and even for people who are not history "buffs" (ugh - aka people who like the history chan---i mean the world war II channel). Like Fawcett's Z, Grann's work is really a relic of a bygone age, and one feels almost transported into the early 20th century and caught up in Fawcett's feverish pursuit of the undiscovered. A great book.

I got a library card from the local library, just recently reopened, to make myself stop buying books, but I'm already going to buy the first book I checked out. Fail. ...more

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Apr 20, 2011 Jessica rated it really liked it

Shelves: exploration-and-travel, latin-america, read-2011, favorites

Wow, this book is captivating. The author did a fantastic job of weaving the results of his research into an extremely readable and engrossing narrative. I had never heard of the explorer Percy Fawcett before or read about any of the expeditions that set out over the past several centuries in search of El Dorado. Fawcett had his own ideas about the possibility of the existence of a lost city that would show that it was possible for an advanced civilization to have existed in the Amazon jungle an ...more

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