Hey guys, I'm Brittany. Today we are talking about The Lost City of Z: A Tale of Deadly Obsession in the Amazon
So this is a nonfiction book that came out in 2009
And it was adapted into a film in 2017 (2016?)
I hope you are ready to tale a mental journey to the Amazon jungle with me because that is where we are headed
So what is this about?
The Lost City of Z chronicles the life of Lieutenant Colonel Percy Fawcett
Around the early 1900's, the turn of the 20th Century, Percy Fawcett is recruited by the
Royal Geographic Society to go to the Amazon jungle
And there was about to be a war breaking out between Bolivia and Brazil
The land was being disputed and it was really one of the last uncharted in the whole world
England was asked to be kind of the referee between these two countries
And more specifically, Percy Fawcett
So he got his start in the Amazon as a surveyor
And he went in - it wasn't just him personally, it was a large party
of people going in to survey the area
But as Percy Fawcett got exposed to this area he became really really obsessed with the concept that
there was this ancient civilization and that there were ruins from this grand city and he really wanted to find it
Fawcett ends up leading several expeditions into the Amazon rain forest throughout his lifetime but
But it's really his very last expedition that becomes legendary
And I won't tell you how it ends, I won't tell you what happens that makes him so legendary
But for decades, even literally 100 years later people are still trying to re-create the last expedition
that Percy Fawcett made into the Amazon jungle
And in the Lost City of Z David Grann is trying to do just that, I mean, David Grann
obviously it's the early 2000's so he can use planes and trucks and airboats and those sorts of things to
to his advantage, but he's try to re-create the route that Percy Fawcett has taken for his last expedition
This book is mostly a biography of Percy Fawcett's life
But it also provides a lot of context about the conquistadors and the other explorers
who came before Percy Fawcett and the body of information that Fawcett would have been drawing from
Where the book really differs in scope from the film is that it also provides a lot of context about
those who came after Percy Fawcet - some of the more notable explorers
Especially James Lynch was discussed a lot in this book
As well as David Grann's own experience
This book is very, very well research, A+ for that
I would say that in his own time Percy Fawcett was a very polarizing figure and Grann
tries to be objective and provide both sides to the story
He tries not to insert his own opinion although
I do think to honest that the book hopped around a bit too much
in terms of time periods and it also included a lot of details that seemed kind of peripheral
So I do wish that the book had been a bit more focused