The Lost City of Z: A Tale of Deadly Obsession in the Amazon
by David Grann

Hardcover, 352pp
Doubleday Publishing, February 2009
ISBN-13: 9780385513531

Barnes & Noble online price: $17.87
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FROM BARNES & NOBLE
In more than one sense, Colonel Percy Harrison Fawcett (1867-1925?) was the last great Victorian explorer. Between 1906 and 1925, this self-trained archaeologist and former secret service agent headed into dense uncharted jungle wilderness more than half a dozen times. On his ambitious final expedition, he set out deep into western Brazil to find a lost El Dorado that he named "Z." Neither he nor any member of his small group returned from the depths of this Amazon "green hell."

Obsessed by the story, New Yorker journalist David Grann embarked on his own quest to discover the truth about the explorer who became the model for Indiana Jones.

FROM THE PUBLISHER
A grand mystery reaching back centuries. A sensational disappearance that made headlines around the world. A quest for truth that leads to death, madness or disappearance for those who seek to solve it. The Lost City of Z is a blockbuster adventure narrative about what lies beneath the impenetrable jungle canopy of the Amazon.

After stumbling upon a hidden trove of diaries, acclaimed New Yorker writer David Grann set out to solve "the greatest exploration mystery of the 20th century": What happened to the British explorer Percy Fawcett and his quest for the lost city of Z?

In 1925 Fawcett ventured into the Amazon to find an ancient civilization, hoping to make one of the most important discoveries in history. For centuries Europeans believed the world's largest jungle concealed the glittering kingdom of El Dorado. Thousands had died looking for it, leaving many scientists convinced that the Amazon was truly inimical to humankind. But Fawcett, whose daring expeditions helped inspire Conan Doyle's The Lost World, had spent years building his scientific case. Captivating the imagination of millions around the globe, Fawcett embarked with his 21-year-old son, determined to prove that this ancient civilization — which he dubbed "Z" — existed. Then he and his expedition vanished.

Fawcett's fate — and the tantalizing clues he left behind about "Z" — became an obsession for hundreds who followed him into the uncharted wilderness. For decades scientists and adventurers have searched for evidence of Fawcett's party and the lost city of Z. Countless have perished, been captured by tribes, or gone mad. As David Grann delved ever deeper into the mystery surrounding Fawcett's quest, and the greater mystery of what lies within the Amazon, he found himself, like the generations who preceded him, being irresistibly drawn into the jungle's "green hell." His quest for the truth and his stunning discoveries about Fawcett's fate and "Z" form the heart of this complex, enthralling narrative.

PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
In 1925, renowned British explorer Col. Percy Harrison Fawcett embarked on a much-publicized search to find the city of Z, site of an ancient Amazonian civilization that may or may not have existed. Fawcett, along with his grown son Jack, never returned. But that didn't stop countless others, including actors, college professors and well-funded explorers from venturing into the jungle to find Fawcett or the city. Among the wannabe explorers is Grann, a staff writer for The New Yorker, who has bad eyes and a worse sense of direction. He became interested in Fawcett while researching another story, eventually venturing into the Amazon to satisfy his all-consuming curiosity about the explorer and his fatal mission.

Largely about Fawcett, the book examines the stranglehold of passion as Grann's vigorous research mirrors Fawcett's obsession with uncovering the mysteries of the jungle. By interweaving the great story of Fawcett with his own investigative escapades in South America and Britain, Grann provides an in-depth, captivating character study that has the relentless energy of a classic adventure tale. (Feb.) Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

LIBRARY JOURNAL
Grann, a staff writer at The New Yorker, gives a gripping, detailed account of the fate of English explorer Percy Fawcett. Fawcett disappeared into the jungles of Brazil in 1925 with his son and his son's best friend. It was not the first time that Fawcett had plunged into Amazonia or confronted pestilence and natives not keen on receiving trespassers. Colonel Fawcett was a soldier, sometime spy, and expert surveyor and explorer who helped define the border between Bolivia and Brazil. But he was primarily obsessed with finding a rumored great city in the jungles of South America, which he simply called Z partly because it did not have a name and partly to throw off others who were looking for it.

Grann's experience following this mystery to England and Brazil was an adventure in its own right. He alternates chapters on Fawcett's adventures, based on his diaries and contemporary accounts, with his own and others' efforts to find Fawcett or at least the truth about his demise. Like the books of Simon Winchester (e.g., The Man Who Loved China), this is a compelling and entertaining read. -Lee Arnold

KIRKUS REVIEWS
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 oft rue adventure, marked by satisfyingly unexpected twists, turns and plenty of dark portents.

WHAT PEOPLE ARE SAYING

"The Story of Z goes to the heart of the central questions of our age. In the battle between man and a hostile environment, who wins? A fascinating and brilliant book." -Malcolm Gladwell, author of Blink and The Tipping Point

"Few things are better than experiencing a horrendous adventure from the comfort of your own armchair. Hordes of mosquitoes, poison-arrow attacks, bizarre and fatal diseases, spies in starched collars, hidden outposts of Atlantis — what's not to like? The Lost City of Z is like a wonderful 19th-century tale of exotic danger — except that David Grann's book is also a sensitively written biographical detective story, a vest pocket history of exploration, and a guide to the new archaeological research that is exploding our preconceptions of the Amazon and its peoples." -Charles Mann, author of 1491

"The Amazon has had many chroniclers, but few who can match David Grann's grasp of history, science and especially narrative. Shifting seamlessly between the past and present, The Lost City of Z is a riveting, totally absorbing real-life adventure story." -Nathaniel Philbrick, author of Mayflower and In the Heart of the Sea

"David Grann's Lost City of Z is a deeply satisfying revelation — a look into the life and times of one of the last great territorial explorers, P. H. Fawcett, and his search for a lost city in the Amazon. I mean, what could be better-obsession, mystery, deadly insects, shrunken heads, suppurating wounds, hostile tribesmen — all for us to savor in our homes.. ." -Erik Larson, author of Thunderstruck, Devil in the White City and Isaac's Storm