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

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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. Killers of the Flower Moon was a finalist for The National Book Award and won an Edgar Allan Poe Award.

But it is also a source of distortion, as it ignores or inflates much available material on Fawcett. For decades explorers and scientists have tried to find evidence of Fawcett's party and of the Lost City of Z. For years after he disappeared, rumors emerged from the jungle of blond-haired, blue-eyed children, supposedly his offsprig, being spotted in tribal enclaves.By his own journalistic autopsis, he vindicates not only Fawcett’s obsession with Z but his own obsession with Fawcett. The book reads pretty much the same way, more like a rigorous piece of unflavored yet salubrious dish, that may or may not be enjoyed by all. I listened to this one on audio and the nattation was excellent but as always with audio I cant help wondering if the hard copy had photos and maps which I would have missed out on in the audio. The Kalapalos observed smoke from Fawcett's expedition's campfire each evening for five days before it disappeared.

Apparently, there is a PBS special on Fawcett and this last expedition and I wouldn't mind watching it based on reading this book so evidently it wasn't a total loss. Percy Harrison Fawcett, the protagonist of the tale, “ was the last of the great Victorian explorers who ventured into uncharted realms with little more than a machete, a compass, and an almost divine sense of purpose. Over eighteen thousand feet high in the Andes, amid snow and clouds, it emerges through a rocky seam--a trickle of crystal water. A terrific adventure story, full of suspense and intrigue and lots of historical detail to keep the reader interested. I keep finding justifications for my (primarily) solitary life of reading and writing—as if I needed any further convincing.But also because there are people who feel an itch so intense that they have to go somewhere as far away from people as possible. Fawcett’s fate—and the tantalizing clues he left behind about "Z" –became an obsession for hundreds who followed him into the uncharted wilderness. Sometimes, you got to care more for your loved ones than the general welfare, even if you’re accused of avarice. According to legend, there were also groves of cinnamon trees in the kingdom, a spice that was highly valued at the time.

What could be better--obsession, mystery, deadly insects, shrunken heads, suppurating wounds, hostile tribesmen--all for us to savor in our homes, safely before the fire. At times, I had to remind myself that everything in this story is true: a movie star really was abducted by Indians; there were cannibals, ruins, secret maps, and spies; explorers died from starvation, disease, attacks by wild animals, and poisonous arrows; and at stake amid the adventure and death was the very understanding of the Americas before Christopher Columbus came ashore in the New World. La leyenda de El Dorado nace cuando los conquistadores españoles buscaban las riquezas que se suponía había en el nuevo mundo y estaba sustentada por relatos de los indios, ya sea por antiguas creencias suyas, ya sea por sacarse de encima al pesado conquistador que solo quería oro. But Fawcett, whose daring expeditions helped inspire Conan Doyle’s The Lost World, had spent years building his scientific case.Had I even taken more than a few trips to the National Zoo's only-slightly-muggy version largely without free-roaming pestilence, my rating would probably have been lower. The ruins were surrounded by several concentric circular moats, with evidence of palisades that had been described in the folklore and oral history of nearby tribes. I read this in anticipation of a book talk and am now dying to find out why this particular work was chosen.