'The Lost City of Z: A Tale of Deadly Obsession in the Amazon' by David Grann

Finished on 11/16/2018 at 6:16 AM

After reading 'Lila: An Inquiry to Morals' by Robert Pirisg, I realized that I really knew nothing about Native American culture and history. This struck me as insane, and I spent the next few years reading as much as I could about the topic.

One of the things that struck me the most was how euro-centric the viewpoint of history (as I had been taught) is. Historians and explorers had entered into rich cultures, but always assumed that they were somehow primitive and often disgarded their history and accomplishments in the process (I beg you to read '1491: New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus' by Charles C. Mann if you haven't already -- in my opinion, it should be mandatory reading for basic American history and it generally has the affect of re-wiring how you think of the world).

'The Lost City of Z' is about Percy Fawcett, who in 1925 isappeared in the Amazon rainforest with his son and his son's best friend, searching for a city that represented a long lost civilization that he believed flourished in the Amazon.

The book, while informative, is written in such a way to entertain (each chapter ends in a cliffhanger) and spends much of it's time documenting Fawcett's life (very interesting) while weaving in David Grann's journey to follow in his footsteps (perhaps more interesting and fun to read).

To me, it misses the depth of a book like '1491', but does a great job as a primer to the mindset of the time and an explorer who was almost ahead of the curve (Fawcett respected the various tribes he interacted with, thought their culture was rich, but also subscribed to the then-popular eugenics theory on European superiority and never quite made the leap to the fact these cultures could have developed agriculture and great cities in parallel to Europeans).

As a quick read, it's worth the time, especially if you haven't dug into indigenous history before. Dunn documents ideas that prevailed during Fawcett's time and how they have changed since. What's also striking are the descriptions of the true wildness of the Amazon -- by weaving Fawcett's story with his own, Dunn shows the massive gap between what has changed (distance is covered faster, terrain is more known, tribe locations are better mapped) and what hasn't (maggots can steal infect your skin and it's hard to know how to get food if you don't know what you're doing).

The human story -- how obsession can come to rule a person's life, to the point where qualified people make insane decisions -- is striking, and may be the most lingering aspect of this book.

I don't think I'll be heading into the wild Amazon rainforest anytime soon, but it is satisfying to know how much is still unknown out there.