The Lost City of Z: A Legendary British Explorer's Deadly Quest to Uncover the Secrets of the Amazon

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Oh, we are white and must go to these countries and whitesplain to the natives that they are inferior, and must mold to our moral ideals or perish. A powerful narrative, stiff lipped and Victorian at the center, trippy at the edges, as if one of those stern men of Conrad had found himself trapped in a novel by García Márquez. For the next eighty years, hordes of explorers plunged into the jungle, trying to find evidence of Fawcett's party or Z. Fawcett también estaba obsesionado con esta búsqueda, en este caso, la ciudad de Z, al escuchar a los indios rumores sobre una antigua civilización.

More than that, however, he discovers—and it would be unfair to a splendid, suspenseful book to say just how—what a few jungle anthropologists have come to believe is the surprising truth about Z. Might not have been my thing but I can totally see why others would find it compelling and I did learn some things that I would otherwise not know. The settlements and civilization of these people appeared to have lasted long enough for them to have had contact with Europeans.Fawcett’s fate—and the tantalizing clues he left behind about "Z" –became an obsession for hundreds who followed him into the uncharted wilderness. Fawcett went on numerous South American explorations with varying degrees of success and always emerging - though slightly worse for wear - in relatively good health compared to the many who perished along the way. What [Grann] finds is what makes The Lost City of Z so gratifying, and in the end he, and we along with him, find ourselves stunned by what Percy Fawcett discovered.

Thus bumblingly shifting through multiple points of view, Grann exhausts readers’ patience and sympathy for the characters intended to be their surrogates. As per usual, I'll refer to Sterling Archer for wisdom (see River of Doubt review), " Everything out here either wants to eat me or give me malaria! I can navigate the river without coming down with some hideous infection or being drained dry by a vampire bat because my arm flopped outside the netting in the middle of the night or feel the sting of a poisonous arrow puncturing my neck. Fawcett would prefer to abandon men rather than lose time taking them to a neighboring village to be cared for.Despite the fact that this book caused me to struggle with my relationship to nonfiction, I was rather taken with the concept. Black Indian earth showed evidence that humans had added supplements to the soil to increase its fertility to support agriculture. And while Fawcett was certainly no gold hunter, his mounting obsession with the lost city of "Z" had me truly wondering just what could be out in that dense and surprisingly delicate land of life.