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The Barnes & Noble Review - Paul La Farge

Percy Harrison Fawcett (he went by "Colonel," although he was only a lieutenant colonel) was among the last of the gentleman explorers, the generalists who set out with machete and sketchbook to fill in the blank spots on the globe. Born in 1867, Fawcett, a wiry teetotalling Englishman who seemed immune to malaria, did this work better and faster than anyone believed was possible: in 1906–7 he mapped the border between Peru, Bolivia, and Brazil, an inhospitable jungle river; in the seven years that followed he was all over the Amazon, sometimes following rivers, sometimes hacking his way overland, always with only a small party to help him. His surveying trips won him a medal from the Royal Geographical Society and a certain amount of fame (although never any money); but the expedition for which he is best known is the one he undertook in 1925, accompanied only by his son Jack and Raleigh Rimmell, Jack's boyhood friend. They were looking for a legendary city, which Fawcett referred to in his notes as "Z." None of them ever returned.

The 1925 expedition has been the subject of much speculation: in addition to the reasonable hypotheses (that Fawcett, Jack, and Rimmell died of natural causes in the jungle or were killed by unfriendly Indians) students of the mystery have imagined that Fawcett was being held captive, or that he had found his city and decided to stay there, or even that he vanished via a mystical portal into the hollow earth. He shows up now and then in the popular imagination: in a volume of Tintin, in an Indiana Jones novel. In 2005 a British theater director claimed, on the evidence of Fawcett's private letters, that the explorer never intended to return from the jungle; instead he planned to start a secret community organized around the worship of his son, along with other "unusual beliefs."

David Grann re-covers this ground in The Lost City of Z. Grann, a staff writer for The New Yorker, is both more thorough and more reliable than most of Fawcett's chroniclers; he follows the explorer from his childhood in England through his military service in Ceylon, his years as a spy in the Middle East, an Amazon explorer, a soldier, and, finally, the victim of his own need to find the aptly named Z, the last letter in the alphabet of his travels.

It's a phenomenal story, and Grann doesn't stint on details. We learn (can this be true?) that Fawcett's mother sent him to the punishing Royal Military Academy at Woolwich because she "liked the splendid uniforms"; that Fawcett's brother Edward helped Helena Blavatsky, through whose ample body every story of 19th-century mysticism must apparently pass, to research her three-volume opus The Secret Doctrine; and that Edward became a writer of popular adventure novels, "the English answer to Jules Verne," whose fictions feature fantastical lost cities not unlike the one Percy would die looking for.

The real explorers who populate The Lost City of Z are no less colorful than the imaginary ones. Fawcett's chief rival in the race to map the South American interior was an American doctor named Alexander Hamilton Rice, whose disposition, means, and methods were the opposite of Fawcett's own. Rice equipped large groups at great personal expense and liked gadgetry: he was the first explorer to bring a radio into the jungle (it weighed 40 pounds, cost the equivalent of $67,000, and couldn't transmit, but it did allow him to keep up with the news), and even built a 40-foot amphibious vessel that might have come straight from one of Edward Fawcett's adventure novels. Rice represented the future of exploration, and Percy Fawcett must at some level have known it; one of the more melancholy currents that runs through The Lost City of Z is Fawcett's growing interest in the occult -- he was a contributor to The Occult Review and wrote an article on "Obsession" for Light magazine -- as though he'd realized that in the material world he was already overmatched.

However strange Fawcett became, however, the people who went looking for him were stranger. The greater tragedy of the Fawcett expedition isn't the fact of Percy Fawcett's own disappearance, or his son's, or even the disappearance of poor Raleigh Rimmell, who'd fallen in love with a duke's daughter on the way to Brazil and had second thoughts about the whole lost-city thing. It's the surprisingly large number of people who died trying to find him, or Z, or both -- all told, perhaps 100. Among them was a Swiss named Rattin, who claimed to have seen Fawcett alive in the jungle, and a Hollywood actor named Albert de Winton, who spent nine months in the jungle, emerged, went back, and didn't emerge again. Eventually it got so bad that the Brazilian government required explorers looking for Fawcett to obtain special permission.

Not everyone who looked for him died. In 1928, an explorer named George Miller Dyott took a party into the Amazon and claimed to have proof that Fawcett had been killed by Indians (his story didn't hold up, but he wrote a book and got a movie deal anyway). One expedition turned up Fawcett's bones (they weren't) and another found Fawcett's grandson Dulipé, the "White God of the Xingu" (he wasn't). In 1996, a Brazilian banker and his son went looking and were kidnapped; fortunately they could pay. Then there was David Grann.

Grann's story of his own trip to the interior, sections of which are interspersed through the book, is impressive: even in the days of the Land Rover and the satellite phone, poking around in the jungle is risky, uncomfortable work. And yet I can't help wishing that Grann had made less of himself. Maybe it's because his adventures, for all their hairy moments, pale in comparison to Fawcett's really horrific slogs through the wilderness, which Grann had to compress in order to keep his book to a manageable size. Or maybe it's because the story of the journalist -- especially the one who, as Grann says of himself, likes "take-out food, sports highlights, and the air-conditioning on high" -- who is compelled not only to write about but to relive his subject matter has become a nonfiction writer's cliché. As far as I can tell, Grann's own travels turned up no information about Fawcett or Z that hadn't been published elsewhere. It's the one part of the book that functions less as an exploration than as a kind of creaky simulacrum, an adventure ride that takes us to a city that's been found over and over. --Paul La Farge

Paul La Farge is the author of two novels: The Artist of the Missing and Haussmann, or the Distinction.

The New York Times - Michiko Kakutani

…at once a biography, a detective story and a wonderfully vivid piece of travel writing that combines Bruce Chatwinesque powers of observation with a Waugh-like sense of the absurd…it reads with all the pace and excitement of a movie thriller and all the verisimilitude and detail of firsthand reportage, and it seems almost surely destined for a secure perch on the best-seller lists.

The New York Times Book Review - Rich Cohen

…outstanding…The book is screwball…a hybrid in which the weak, fear-wracked reporter from the present age confronts the crazed iron men of yore, citizens of a country as grand and gone as the kingdom of the Incas. The result is 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 Garcia Marquez.

The Washington Post - Marie Arana

The Lost City of Z…recounts Fawcett's expeditions with all the pace of a white-knuckle adventure story. The book is a model of suspense and concision…Although Fawcett's story cuts through 100 years of complicated history, Grann follows its twists and turns admirably. Thoroughly researched, vividly told, this is a thrill ride from start to finish.

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.)

Lee Arnold - 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. Recommended for all public and academic libraries.

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 oftrue adventure, marked by satisfyingly unexpected twists, turns and plenty of dark portents. First printing of 125,000

What People Are Saying

"What a wild and adventurous life! In the deft storytelling hands of David Grann, explorer Percy Fawcett emerges as one of the most ambitious, colorful, just plain intrepid figures ever to set foot in the New World. Part Indiana Jones, part Livingstone, and part Kit Carson, Fawcett has found his perfect biographer in Grann, who has gamely endured every conceivable Amazonian hardship to piece together the story of this British swashbuckler and his crazed search for a vanished civilization."--(Hampton Sides, author of Blood and Thunder and Ghost Soldiers)

What People Are Saying

"A fantastic story of courage, obsession, and mystery, THE LOST CITY OF Z is gripping from beginning to end. In the pantheon of classic exploration tales, this stands out as one of the best."--(Candice Millard, author The River of Doubt)

What People Are Saying

"With this riveting work, David Grann emerges on our national landscape as a major new talent. His superb writing style, his skills as a reporter, his masterful use of historical and scientific documents, and his stunning storytelling ability are on full display here, producing an endlessly absorbing tale about a magical subject that captivates from start to finish. This is a terrific book."--(Doris Kearns Goodwin, author of Team of Rivals)

What People Are Saying

"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, safely before the fire."--(Erik Larson, author of Thunderstruck, Devil in the White City and Isaac's Storm)

What People Are Saying

"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)

What People Are Saying

"A wonderfully researched true story about an intrepid adventurer, a colorful cast, and an obsession that grips both him and the author."--(Walter Isaacson, author of Einstein)

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)

What People Are Saying

"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)

• Table of Contents
• Interviews & Essays
• Reading Group Guide
• Forewords & Introductions
• Read an Excerpt

Table of Contents

Interviews & Essays

Reading Group Guide

Forewords & Introductions

Read an Excerpt