The Lost City of Z: A Tale of Deadly Obsession in the Amazon
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- ISBN13: 9780739328347
- Condition: NEW
- Notes: Brand New from Publisher. No Remainder Mark.
Product Description
After stumbling upon a hidden trove of diaries, acclaimed New Yorker writer David Grann set out to solve “the greatest exploration mystery of the twentieth 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 very ancient civilization, vowing to make one of the most vital archaeological discoveries in history. For centuries Europeans believed the world’s largest jungle concealed the glittering kingdom of El Dorado. Captivating the imagination of millions around the globe, Fawcett embarked with his twenty-one-year-ancient son to prove that this very ancient civilization–which he dubbed “Z”–existed. Then he and his expedition vanished.
For decades scientists and adventurers have searched for evidence of Fawcett’s party and the Lost City of Z. Countless have corroded, 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 establish himself, like the generations who preceded him, 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 enchanting narrative.
From the Compact Disc edition.Amazon.com Review
Amazon Exclusive: John Grisham Reviews The Lost City of Z
Since first publishing A Time to Kill in 1988, John Grisham has written twenty novels and one work of nonfiction, The Innocent Man. His second novel, The Firm, spent 47 weeks on the New York Times bestseller list, apt the bestselling novel of 1991. The success of The Pelican Brief, which hit number one on the New York Times bestseller list, and The Client, which debuted at number one, confirmed Grisham’s reputation as the master of the officially authorized thriller. His most recent novel, The Associate, was published in January 2009. Read his exclusive Amazon guest review of The Lost City of Z:
In April of 1925, a legendary British explorer named Percy Fawcett launched his final expedition into the depths of the Amazon in Brazil. His destination was the lost city of El Dorado, the “City of Gold,” an very ancient kingdom of fantastic sophistication, architecture, and culture that, for some reason, had vanished. The thought of El Dorado had captivated anthropologists, adventurers, and scientists for 400 years, though there was no evidence it ever existed. Hundreds of expeditions had gone looking for it. Thousands of men had corroded in the jungles searching for it. Fawcett himself had barely survived several previous expeditions and was more determined than ever to find the lost city with its streets and temples of gold.
The world was watching. Fawcett, the last of the fantastic Victorian adventurers, was financed by the Royal Geographical Society in London, the world’s foremost repository of research gathered by explorers. Fawcett, then age 57, had proclaimed for decades his belief in the City of Z, as he had nicknamed it. His writings, speeches, and exploits had captured the imagination of millions, and reports of his last expedition were front page news.
His expeditionary force consisted of three men–himself, his 21-year-ancient son Jack, and one of Jack’s friends. Fawcett believed that only a tiny group had any chance of extant the horrors of the Amazon. He had seen large forces decimated by malaria, insects, snakes, poison darts, starvation, and insanity. He knew better. He and his two companions would travel light, carry their own supplies, eat off the land, pose no threat to the natives, and suffer months of hardship in their search for the Lost City of Z.
They were never seen again. Fawcett’s daily dispatches trickled to a stop. Months passed with no word. Because he had survived several similar forays into the Amazon, his family tree and friends considered him to be near super-human. As before, they expected Fawcett to stumble out of the jungle, bearded and emaciated and announcing some fantastic discovery. It did not take place.
Over the years, the search for Fawcett became more alluring than the search for El Dorado itself. Rescue efforts, from the serious to the farcical, materialized in the years that followed, and hundreds of others lost their lives in the search. Rewards were posted. Psychics were brought in by the family tree. Articles and books were written. For decades the legend of Percy Fawcett refused to die.
The fantastic mystery of what happened to Fawcett has never been solved, perhaps until now. In 2004, leader David Grann learned the tale while researching another one. Soon, like hundreds before him, he became obsessed with the legend of the colorful adventurer and his baffling disappearance. Grann, a lifelong New Yorker with an admitted aversion to camping and mountain climbing, a lousy sense of direction, and an affinity for take-out food and air conditioning, soon establish himself in the jungles of the Amazon. What he establish there, some 80 years after Fawcett’s disappearance, is a startling conclusion to this absorbing narrative.
The Lost City of Z is a riveting, exciting and painstakingly compelling tale of adventure.
(Photo © Maki Galimberti)
A Q&A with Leader David Grann
Question: When did you first stumble upon the tale of Percy Fawcett and his search for an very ancient civilization in the Amazon—and when did you realize this particular tale had you in “the grip”?
David Grann: While I was researching a tale on the mysterious death of the world’s greatest Sherlock Holmes practiced, I came upon a reference to Fawcett’s role in inspiring Arthur Conan Doyle’s novel The Lost World. Curious, I plugged Fawcett’s name into a newspaper database and was amazed by the headlines that appeared, including “THREE MEN FACE CANNIBALS IN RELIC QUEST” and tribesmen “Seize Movie Actor Seeking to Rescue Fawcett.” As I read each tale, I became more and more curious–about how Fawcett’s quest for a lost city and his disappearance had captivated the world; how for decades hundreds of scientists and explorers had tried to find evidence of Fawcett’s missing party and the City of Z; and how countless seekers had disappeared or died from starvation, diseases, attacks by wild animals, or poisonous arrows. What intrigued me most, though, was the notion of Z. For years most scientists had considered the brutal conditions in the largest jungle in the world unfavorable to humankind, but more recently some archeologists had begun to question this longstanding view and believed that a sophisticated civilization like Z might have existed. Such a discovery would challenge virtually everything that was believed about the scenery of the Amazon and what the Americas looked liked before the arrival of Christopher Columbus. Suddenly, the tale had every tantalizing element–mystery, obsession, death, madness–as well as fantastic intellectual stakes. Still, I probably didn’t realize I was fully in the tale’s “grip” until I told my wife that I plotted to take out an extra life insurance policy and follow Fawcett’s trail into the Amazon.
Q: Tell us about the discovery of Fawcett’s previously unpublished diaries and logbooks.
DG: Researching the book regularly felt like a kind of treasure hunt and nothing was more exciting than coming across these materials in an ancient chest in the house of one of Fawcett’s grandchildren. Fawcett, who had been a British spy, was extremely secretive about his search for Z–in part because he didn’t want his rivals to learn the lost city before he did and in part because he feared that too many people would die if they tried to follow in his wake. These ancient, crumbling diaries and logbooks held incredible clues to both Fawcett’s life and death; what’s more, they revealed a key to his clandestine route to the Lost City of Z.
Q: In an attempt to retrace Fawcett’s journey, many scientists and explorers have faced madness, kidnapping, and death. Did you ever hesitate to go to the Amazon?
DG: I probably should have been more hesitant, especially after reading some of the diaries of members of additional parties that had scoured the Amazon for a lost city. One seeker of El Dorado described reaching a state of “privation so fantastic that we were eating nothing but leather, belts and soles of shoes, cooked with certain herbs, with the result that so fantastic was our weakness that we could not remain standing.” In that expedition alone, some four thousand men corroded. Additional explorers resorted to cannibalism. One searcher went so mad he stabbed his own child, whispering, “Commend thyself to God, my daughter, for I am about to kill thee.” But to be honest, even after reading these accounts, I was so consumed by the tale that I did not reflect much about the consequences–and one of the themes I try to explore in the book is the lethal scenery of obsession.
Q: When you were separated from your guide Paolo on the way to the Kuikuro village and seemingly lost and alone in the jungle, what was going through your mind?
DG: Besides dread, I kept wondering what the hell I was doing on such a mad quest.
Q: Paolo and you made a game of imagining what happened to Fawcett in the Amazon. Lacking giving anything away about The Lost City of Z, I was wondering if you came away with any final conclusions?
DG: I don’t want to give too much away; but, after poring over Fawcett’s final letters and dispatches from the expedition and after interviewing many of the tribes that Fawcett himself had encountered, I felt as if I had come as close as possible to knowing why Fawcett and his party vanished.
Q: In his praise for your book, Malcolm Gladwell questions a “central question of our age”: “In the battle between man and a hostile environment, who wins?” Obviously, the jungle has won many times, but it seems man may be gaining. What are your thoughts on the deforestation taking place in the Amazon?
DG: It is a fantastic tragedy. Over the last four decades in Brazil alone, the Amazon has lost some two hundred and seventy thousand square miles of its original forest take in–an area larger than France. Many tribes, including some I visited, are being threatened with extinction. Countless animals and plants, many of them with potential medicinal purposes, are also vanishing. One of the things that the book explores is how early Native American societies were regularly able to overcome their hostile environment lacking destroying it. Sorry to say, that has not been the case with the latest wave of trespassers.
Q: You started this journey as a man who doesn’t like to camp and has “a terrible sense of direction and tend[s] to forget where [you are] on the subway and miss[es] [your] stop in Brooklyn.” Are you now an avid outdoorsman?
DG: No. Once was enough for me!
Q: Early in the book, you write, “Ever since I was young, I’ve been drawn to mystery and adventure tales.” What have been some of your favorite books–past and present–that fall into this category?
DG: I’m a huge Sherlock Holmes fan, and every few years go back and read the tales again. I do the same with many of Joseph Conrad’s novels, including Lord Jim. I’m permanently amazed at how he produced quest novels that reflected the Victorian era and yet seem to have been written with the wisdom of a historian looking back in time. As for more contemporary authors, I read a lot of crime fiction, especially the works of George Pelecanos and Michael Connelly. I also relish books, such as Jonathan Lethem’s Motherless Brooklyn, that cleverly play with this genre. Finally, there are the gripping yarns written by authors like Jon Krakauer and Nathaniel Philbrick-—tales that are all the more spellbinding because they are right.
Q: Brad Pitt and Paramount optioned The Lost City of Z in the spring. Any updates?
DG: They have hired a screenwriter and director and seem to be moving forwards at a excellent clip.
Q: What are you effective on now?
DG: I recently finished a couple of crime tales for The New Yorker, including one about a Polish leader who allegedly committed murder and then left clues about the real crime in his novel. Meanwhile, I’m hoping to find a tantalizing tale, like The Lost City of Z, that will lead to a new book.
Q: Anything else you’d like to add?
DG: Just that I hope that readers will delight in The Lost City of Z and find the tale of Fawcett and his quest as captivating as I did.
(Photo © Matt Richman)
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Doubleday has chosen to criminally disable text-to-speech in this book, hurting their own sales, discriminating against the blind and reading disabled, and joined the Luddite mentality of Random House to shoot themselves in the foot.
You, the consumer, are being treated like a criminal. I encourage you to not buy this book or any additional books. Do not support stupidity or discrimination
Reader’s Rating: 1 / 5
This is not a review of the book. I will not order it because the text to speech function is disabled.
Reader’s Rating: 1 / 5
I was going to buy this book on Kindle until I saw that text to speech is disabled. Although I may not use this feature, on all-purpose principle I will boycott the book and it’s leader. It is especially annoying since they are charging two and a half times a much for an audio version. This is obscene.
Reader’s Rating: 1 / 5
The best use of this book was as bedtime reading. It was 100% effective. It took a long time to read because I fell asleep after 10 minutes of reading. it was poorly written and poorly edited. I didn’t care about any of the characters. They were poorly drawn and lacking maps, it was hard to follow the events and grasp the scope of the “adventure”. I don’t know why anyone would care about a British adventurer who spent years searching for treasure in the Amazon jungle and finally took his elder son and friend into the jungles where they met their fate at the hands of aboriginals.
Reader’s Rating: 1 / 5
I can’t judge I missed this when I bought this audiobook. It was fascinating to me how a book could be abstractedly appealing, and dull at the same time. I just kept waiting for something to HAPPEN. But now, I guess I can forgive it, because it is a right tale. I’m so glad I’m nearly through with it. The only reason I wrote this review is to spare a name else who might be intrigued with the premise, and reflect it’s going to be an actual adventure tale, not a series of ENDLESS mini-tales.
Reader’s Rating: 2 / 5