The Lost City of Z

What do you know of The Amazon? Rainforests? Tribes of primitive Indians? Dangerous insects and animals? Think again. That is only a minute part of the story and, in the case of the Indians, entirely wrong.

Author David Grann brings us the story of the mysterious disappearance of the English explorer Col. Percy Harrison Fawcett, the last of the Victorian pioneer explorers who, armed with little more than a machete and a gut instinct, mapped large parts of the unexplored world.

Fawcett's forte was exploring the Amazon. He definitively mapped the Bolivian/Brazilian border; he penetrated into areas no white man had gone before; he became obsessed with finding a lost city which would prove that a lost civilisation once existed within the harsh jungle environment of the Amazon.

Grann relates a gripping tale of human endurance under extreme conditions. Fawcett, in his time, was as famous as any modern day movie star, his exploits reported around the world. But his obsession with ‘Z' would lead to bankruptcy, and flirtations with occultism. Eventually he would seemingly vanish off the face of the earth as he, his son Jack and Jack's best friend Raleigh, tried once last expedition into the green hell of the Amazon.

Grann also tells of the rescue missions that came after Fawcett's disappearance. Of the bizarre cults that grew up, each with their own fantastic theory on Fawcett's vanishing act. Eventually even the author is drawn into the Amazon to try and find the truth. I won't spoil the ending by revealing what he found, but I will say that this is a page turner of a book, about a man who endured much in the name of exploration.