I’m part of a faculty book club at my job. That’s a good thing for someone like me who has oodles and oodles of unread books I’d like to get to. In point of fact, the reason I joined in the first place was primarily because the book they were starting with was one I had in one of my many unread book stacks, and having a reason to read it would help me get to it faster. When the time came, I went through my stacks and picked out a few I thought might be of interest to the others. It turned out that was true for all of them, but the one we ended up going with was David Grann’s The Lost City of Z.
I said I was glad to have read the first book we went with, and I am really glad to have read this one too. I hope that trend continues with our preselected next book, namely Walter Isaacson’s Einstein biography. But in the meantime, we read all about the Lost City of Z, presumably pronounced “Zed” because a British person sort of named it.
The Lost City of Z follows two parallel storylines. The first, primary one, is about British explorer Percy Fawcett. Fawcett explored the Amazon rainforest At some point, Fawcett became obsessed with the idea that somewhere deep in the jungles of modern day Brazil was a lost city that he called simply “Z,” and it became his life’s goal to find it. In 1925, he went in with a small group that was basically just himself, his oldest son, and his oldest son’s closest friend. None of them returned. Meanwhile, in the present (or around 2009 to be more precise), Grann, a man with no actual experience living off the land in any way, started to write a book about Fawcett and went to see if he could retrace the man’s steps. Grann made no illusions about finding out what exactly happened to Fawcett or even maybe finding the real Z, a place that may or may not have even been real, but he was going to take a look anyway.
It’s actually a fascinating read. The Fawcett material covers the entire life of the man, a fellow who struggled to get money to live off or even to go exploring, but a natural when it came to learning the lessons of the Royal Geographical Society, an organizations whose purpose was to train explorers in a thinly disguised way to keep Britain a dominant world power by simply sending people to see what was out there. Fawcett had a lot going for him, but Grann makes it clear he was also impatient and judgmental for the people who couldn’t keep up with him during his expeditions, and that was most people because one of the ongoing themes of this book is the jungle is a really dangerous place even if you go in prepared.
Seriously, my book club seems to have all come to the agreement that none of us can quite understand why people to this day keep going in there. Between hostile natives, disease-carrying insects, food that is hard to get if you don’t know what you’re doing, and conditions that aren’t really all that favorable to most people, it does make the rainforest seem like the worst place to go. One of Fawcett’s partners for one expedition was a famed Arctic explorer, and the differences between the two terrains could not have been more different. Fawcett’s partner fared so poorly on that one because mastering a cold place is not the same as mastering a tropical one, and Fawcett had no patience for the man’s problems as they just slowed him down. The rainforest is depicted here as something that tests everyone who goes in there, and even people who consider themselves to be tough and hardy, like Theodore Roosevelt, often come out having just barely survived if at all.
But then there would be sections where Grann wrote about his own investigations into Fawcett’s life and disappearance as well planning his own trip there. Grann states that his biggest interest as a writer is in obsessions, and while he may not be completely there, the fact that he’s going to a place that, while not as dangerous today as it was a century ago, is still not the friendliest of locations says a lot about him. But what may be the most interesting aspect of his work is he is asking if Z actually is a real place. There’s evidence both pro and con, but Grann is interested in seeing if Fawcett was on the right track when he disappeared or not on top of everything else, and that investigation may be the one that bore the most interesting answers.
So, right now my faculty book club is two for two. Might be time to bring on Albert Einstein.
Grade: A
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