Grann paints a vivid picture of the final days of trail-blazing, Earth-bound grand exploration, before airplanes and radios began stripping the mystery from the unknown parts of the world. Fawcett would prefer to abandon men rather than lose time taking them to a neighboring village to be cared for. My favourite sections were those in which Grann tells his parallel tale of discovering Fawcett and developing his own obsessions about the explorer’s unknown fate.

David Grann is the author of the Number One international bestsellers KILLERS OF THE FLOWER MOON, THE LOST CITY OF Z and THE WAGER.He knows how to weave a yarn and draw the reader in; I was captivated by this story of one man’s obsession with finding the lost city of Z.

This book not only traces Grann's efforts, but takes the reader back into the Victorian period, at the peak of the British Empire, to look at exactly who Percy Fawcett was. Grann shows, as well, the challenges, the horrors of trying to traverse one of the most unwelcoming areas on earth. Some of those old views were what started horrible and asinine beliefs/movements like eugenics, or cultural destruction by evangelization. As fortune would have it, he lived in a time and place where conquering the last of our Earth's unknowns was in high fashion: Victorian England.

A fantastic story of courage, obsession, and mystery, The Lost City of Z is gripping from beginning to end. He is short, pudgy, and not athletic, but he is helped by some modern conveniences that Fawcett would have snickered at the prospect of using. I went somewhere in the middle, unfortunately, as I really thought it would be on a par with Krakauer’s works. It was almost like a game to them, a great race to see who could get there first, be it the depths of the jungle or the arctic pole.

And I don’t want to hear about global warming or any nonsense about generating most of the world’s oxygen. The tid-bits about the jungle, mentioned by other reviewers on Goodreads, I first learned about in The River of Doubt by Candice Millard. Despite the fact that this book caused me to struggle with my relationship to nonfiction, I was rather taken with the concept. Along with Antarctica, it remained beyond the reach of all but a handful of adventurers, of whom Fawcett was the most celebrated.A riveting adventure-mystery in the tradition of Conan Doyle's The Lost World, said to be inspired by Fawcett. Colonel Percy Harrison Fawcett is an intrepid explorer who mapped areas of South America previously unknown to Europeans. There were many attempts by later explorers of varying levels of expertise to find Fawcett, or at least to learn definitively of his fate.

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. Indeed, some might say that explorers become explorers precisely because they have a streak of unsociability and a need to remove themselves at regular intervals as far as possible from their fellow men. Seriously though, as noted in my review of Candice Millard's The River of Doubt: Theodore Roosevelt's Darkest Journey, and further evidenced in reading this tale, the jungle is a punishing, dangerous place. I particulary enjoyed how the author weaved suspense, history and geography together in this book and I was entertained as well as educated which really added to my enjoyment of the read. I highly recommend this book for fans of "Indiana Jones," early 20th century history stories, and just those tired of sitting on their lounger at home and wondering whether or not they should drop everything and run off into the jungle.The ancient city of Z" an advanced civilization that many believed to have once inhabited the jungle. The high rate of fatality of these epidemics disrupted the people and their society: in only a few years, they were so devastated by disease that they had virtually died out. I cannot recommend this book highly enough, and I would like to thank Doubleday for sending me this book and also those on Shelf Awareness for offering it as an ARC. You can see how someone, perhaps someone who goes by the alias of Kemper, would read this book and come to the conclusion that we need to destroy the rainforest immediately (see review and comments that follow for a glimpse at the behaviors of peoples who have never before come into contact with sarcasm).