The Lost City of Z: A Legendary British Explorer's Deadly Quest to Uncover the Secrets of the Amazon

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A military man with an athlete's physique and a cast iron constitution, Fawcett made the perfect explorer. Fearless and determined, he made a series of trips, beginning in 1906, deep into the South American interior to map out uncharted territory for the Royal Geographical Society. But Fawcett, whose daring expeditions helped inspire Conan Doyle’s The Lost World, had spent years building his scientific case.

More than that, however, he discovers—and it would be unfair to a splendid, suspenseful book to say just how—what a few jungle anthropologists have come to believe is the surprising truth about Z.You can find a bit of similarity to the famous biography of Christopher McCandless, and that’s where the tale shines, too. Percy Harrison Fawcett, the protagonist of the tale, “ was the last of the great Victorian explorers who ventured into uncharted realms with little more than a machete, a compass, and an almost divine sense of purpose. That perpetual urge to find/experience/accomplish/see/do/have the next unattainable thing, to catch the carrot that's always dangling just out of reach?

I went somewhere in the middle, unfortunately, as I really thought it would be on a par with Krakauer’s works. I had really been looking forward to reading it, but I found it slow and it took me way longer to read than I had anticipated.Colonel Percy Harrison Fawcett was the last of a breed of great British explorers who ventured into ‘blank spots’ on the map with little more than a machete, a compass and an unwavering sense of purpose.