| View Larger Image | The Lost City of Z: A Tale of Deadly Obsession in the Amazon | Hardcoverby David Grann (Author)
| List Price: | $27.50 | | Price: | $16.08 | | You Save: | $11.42 (42%) | | | Available: | Usually ships in 24 hours |
| | Binding: | Hardcover | | Publisher: | Doubleday | | Page Count: | 352 Pages | | Publication Date: | February 24, 2009 | | Sales Rank: | 394th |
|
FEATURES | - ISBN13: 9780385513531
- Condition: NEW
- Notes: Brand New from Publisher. No Remainder Mark.
- Click here to view our Condition Guide and Shipping Prices
|
EDITORIAL REVIEWS |
Product Description
A grand mystery reaching back centuries. A sensational disappearance that made headlines around the world. A quest for truth that leads to death, madness or disappearance for those who seek to solve it. The Lost City of Z is a blockbuster adventure narrative about what lies beneath the impenetrable jungle canopy of the Amazon. After stumbling upon a hidden trove of diaries, acclaimed New Yorker writer David Grann set out to solve "the greatest exploration mystery of the twentieth century:" What happened to the British explorer Percy Fawcett and his quest for the Lost City of Z? In 1925 Fawcett ventured into the Amazon to find an ancient civilization, hoping to make one of the most important discoveries in history. For centuries Europeans believed the world’s largest jungle concealed the glittering kingdom of El Dorado. Thousands had died looking for it, leaving many scientists convinced that the Amazon was truly inimical to humankind. But Fawcett, whose daring expeditions helped inspire Conan Doyle’s The Lost World, had spent years building his scientific case. Captivating the imagination of millions around the globe, Fawcett embarked with his twenty-one-year-old son, determined to prove that this ancient civilization--which he dubbed “Z”--existed. Then he and his expedition vanished. Fawcett’s fate--and the tantalizing clues he left behind about “Z”--became an obsession for hundreds who followed him into the uncharted wilderness. For decades scientists and adventurers have searched for evidence of Fawcett’s party and the lost City of Z. Countless have perished, been captured by tribes, or gone mad. As David Grann delved ever deeper into the mystery surrounding Fawcett’s quest, and the greater mystery of what lies within the Amazon, he found himself, like the generations who preceded him, being irresistibly drawn into the jungle’s “green hell.” His quest for the truth and his stunning discoveries about Fawcett’s fate and “Z” form the heart of this complex, enthralling narrative. |
Amazon.com Review
Amazon Exclusive: John Grisham Reviews The Lost City of Z Since first publishing A Time to Kill in 1988, John Grisham has written twenty novels and one work of nonfiction, The Innocent Man. His second novel, The Firm, spent 47 weeks on the New York Times bestseller list, becoming the bestselling novel of 1991. The success of The Pelican Brief, which hit number one on the New York Times bestseller list, and The Client, which debuted at number one, confirmed Grisham's reputation as the master of the legal thriller. His most recent novel, The Associate, was published in January 2009. Read his exclusive Amazon guest review of The Lost City of Z: In April of 1925, a legendary British explorer named Percy Fawcett launched his final expedition into the depths of the Amazon in Brazil. His destination was the lost city of El Dorado, the “City of Gold,” an ancient kingdom of great sophistication, architecture, and culture that, for some reason, had vanished. The idea of El Dorado had captivated anthropologists, adventurers, and scientists for 400 years, though there was no evidence it ever existed. Hundreds of expeditions had gone looking for it. Thousands of men had perished in the jungles searching for it. Fawcett himself had barely survived several previous expeditions and was more determined than ever to find the lost city with its streets and temples of gold. The world was watching. Fawcett, the last of the great Victorian adventurers, was financed by the Royal Geographical Society in London, the world’s foremost repository of research gathered by explorers. Fawcett, then age 57, had proclaimed for decades his belief in the City of Z, as he had nicknamed it. His writings, speeches, and exploits had captured the imagination of millions, and reports of his last expedition were front page news. His expeditionary force consisted of three men--himself, his 21-year-old son Jack, and one of Jack’s friends. Fawcett believed that only a small group had any chance of surviving the horrors of the Amazon. He had seen large forces decimated by malaria, insects, snakes, poison darts, starvation, and insanity. He knew better. He and his two companions would travel light, carry their own supplies, eat off the land, pose no threat to the natives, and endure months of hardship in their search for the Lost City of Z. They were never seen again. Fawcett’s daily dispatches trickled to a stop. Months passed with no word. Because he had survived several similar forays into the Amazon, his family and friends considered him to be near super-human. As before, they expected Fawcett to stumble out of the jungle, bearded and emaciated and announcing some fantastic discovery. It did not happen. Over the years, the search for Fawcett became more alluring than the search for El Dorado itself. Rescue efforts, from the serious to the farcical, materialized in the years that followed, and hundreds of others lost their lives in the search. Rewards were posted. Psychics were brought in by the family. Articles and books were written. For decades the legend of Percy Fawcett refused to die. The great mystery of what happened to Fawcett has never been solved, perhaps until now. In 2004, author David Grann discovered the story while researching another one. Soon, like hundreds before him, he became obsessed with the legend of the colorful adventurer and his baffling disappearance. Grann, a lifelong New Yorker with an admitted aversion to camping and mountain climbing, a lousy sense of direction, and an affinity for take-out food and air conditioning, soon found himself in the jungles of the Amazon. What he found there, some 80 years after Fawcett’s disappearance, is a startling conclusion to this absorbing narrative. The Lost City of Z is a riveting, exciting and thoroughly compelling tale of adventure. (Photo © Maki Galimberti) A Q&A with Author David Grann Question: When did you first stumble upon the story of Percy Fawcett and his search for an ancient civilization in the Amazon—and when did you realize this particular story had you in “the grip”? David Grann: While I was researching a story on the mysterious death of the world’s greatest Sherlock Holmes expert, I came upon a reference to Fawcett’s role in inspiring Arthur Conan Doyle’s novel The Lost World. Curious, I plugged Fawcett’s name into a newspaper database and was amazed by the headlines that appeared, including “THREE MEN FACE CANNIBALS IN RELIC QUEST” and tribesmen “Seize Movie Actor Seeking to Rescue Fawcett.” As I read each story, I became more and more curious--about how Fawcett’s quest for a lost city and his disappearance had captivated the world; how for decades hundreds of scientists and explorers had tried to find evidence of Fawcett’s missing party and the City of Z; and how countless seekers had disappeared or died from starvation, diseases, attacks by wild animals, or poisonous arrows. What intrigued me most, though, was the notion of Z. For years most scientists had considered the brutal conditions in the largest jungle in the world inimical to humankind, but more recently some archeologists had begun to question this longstanding view and believed that a sophisticated civilization like Z might have existed. Such a discovery would challenge virtually everything that was believed about the nature of the Amazon and what the Americas looked liked before the arrival of Christopher Columbus. Suddenly, the story had every tantalizing element--mystery, obsession, death, madness--as well as great intellectual stakes. Still, I probably didn’t realize I was fully in the story’s “grip” until I told my wife that I planned to take out an extra life insurance policy and follow Fawcett’s trail into the Amazon. Q: Tell us about the discovery of Fawcett’s previously unpublished diaries and logbooks. DG: Researching the book often felt like a kind of treasure hunt and nothing was more exciting than coming across these materials in an old chest in the house of one of Fawcett’s grandchildren. Fawcett, who had been a British spy, was extremely secretive about his search for Z--in part because he didn’t want his rivals to discover the lost city before he did and in part because he feared that too many people would die if they tried to follow in his wake. These old, crumbling diaries and logbooks held incredible clues to both Fawcett’s life and death; what’s more, they revealed a key to his clandestine route to the Lost City of Z. Q: In an attempt to retrace Fawcett’s journey, many scientists and explorers have faced madness, kidnapping, and death. Did you ever hesitate to go to the Amazon? DG: I probably should have been more hesitant, especially after reading some of the diaries of members of other parties that had scoured the Amazon for a lost city. One seeker of El Dorado described reaching a state of “privation so great that we were eating nothing but leather, belts and soles of shoes, cooked with certain herbs, with the result that so great was our weakness that we could not remain standing.” In that expedition alone, some four thousand men perished. Other explorers resorted to cannibalism. One searcher went so mad he stabbed his own child, whispering, “Commend thyself to God, my daughter, for I am about to kill thee.” But to be honest, even after reading these accounts, I was so consumed by the story that I did not think much about the consequences--and one of the themes I try to explore in the book is the lethal nature of obsession. Q: When you were separated from your guide Paolo on the way to the Kuikuro village and seemingly lost and alone in the jungle, what was going through your mind? DG: Besides fear, I kept wondering what the hell I was doing on such a mad quest. Q: Paolo and you made a game of imagining what happened to Fawcett in the Amazon. Without giving anything away about The Lost City of Z, I was wondering if you came away with any final conclusions? DG: I don’t want to give too much away; but, after poring over Fawcett’s final letters and dispatches from the expedition and after interviewing many of the tribes that Fawcett himself had encountered, I felt as if I had come as close as possible to knowing why Fawcett and his party vanished. Q: In his praise for your book, Malcolm Gladwell asks a “central question of our age”: “In the battle between man and a hostile environment, who wins?” Obviously, the jungle has won many times, but it seems man may be gaining. What are your thoughts on the deforestation taking place in the Amazon? DG: It is a great tragedy. Over the last four decades in Brazil alone, the Amazon has lost some two hundred and seventy thousand square miles of its original forest cover--an area bigger than France. Many tribes, including some I visited, are being threatened with extinction. Countless animals and plants, many of them with potential medicinal purposes, are also vanishing. One of the things that the book explores is how early Native American societies were often able to overcome their hostile environment without destroying it. Unfortunately, that has not been the case with the latest wave of trespassers. Q: You began this journey as a man who doesn’t like to camp and has “a terrible sense of direction and tend[s] to forget where [you are] on the subway and miss[es] [your] stop in Brooklyn.” Are you now an avid outdoorsman? DG: No. Once was enough for me! Q: Early in the book, you write, “Ever since I was young, I’ve been drawn to mystery and adventure tales.” What have been some of your favorite books--past and present--that fall into this category? DG: I’m a huge Sherlock Holmes fan, and every few years go back and read the stories again. I do the same with many of Joseph Conrad’s novels, including Lord Jim. I’m always amazed at how he produced quest novels that reflected the Victorian era and yet seem to have been written with the wisdom of a historian looking back in time. As for more contemporary authors, I read a lot of crime fiction, especially the works of George Pelecanos and Michael Connelly. I also relish books, such as Jonathan Lethem’s Motherless Brooklyn, that cleverly play with this genre. Finally, there are the gripping yarns written by authors like Jon Krakauer and Nathaniel Philbrick-—stories that are all the more spellbinding because they are true. Q: Brad Pitt and Paramount optioned The Lost City of Z in the spring. Any updates? DG: They have hired a screenwriter and director and seem to be moving forward at a good clip. Q: What are you working on now? DG: I recently finished a couple of crime stories for The New Yorker, including one about a Polish author who allegedly committed murder and then left clues about the real crime in his novel. Meanwhile, I’m hoping to find a tantalizing story, like The Lost City of Z, that will lead to a new book. Q: Anything else you’d like to add? DG: Just that I hope that readers will enjoy The Lost City of Z and find the story of Fawcett and his quest as captivating as I did. (Photo © Matt Richman) Look Inside The Lost City of Z Click on thumbnails for larger images Percy Harrison Fawcett was considered “the last of the individualist explorers”—those who ventured into blank spots on the map with little more than a machete, a compass, and an almost divine sense of purpose. He is seen here in 1911, the year of his fourth major Amazon expedition. (Copyright © R. de Montet-Guerin) Fawcett mapping the frontier between Brazil and Bolivia in 1908. (Courtesy of the Royal Geographical Society) Dr. Alexander Hamilton Rice, Fawcett’s main rival, was a multimillionaire “as much at home in the elegant swirl of Newport society as in the steaming jungles of Brazil.” (Courtesy of the Royal Geographical Society) A member of Dr. Rice’s 1919-20 expedition deploys a wireless telegraphy set—an early radio—allowing the party to receive news from the outside world. (Courtesy of the Royal Geographical Society) |
CUSTOMER REVIEWS (Average Customer Rating: 4.0 based on 216 reviews)
|
Narcissist by TailorMaid7  5 Stars
November 30, 2009
I am only about half way through but feel compelled to jot down a thought about the transparent narcissism of Fawcett. The author mentions two very specific symptoms of the disorder; lack of empathy and extreme sensitivity to criticism. What else can really explain the hubris of a man who repeatedly faces almost certain death thinking he was invincible? The difference between him and the other narcissists that thought they could take on the jungle is that the other guys got caught first. History is written by the survivors. The story is fascinating, but to celebrate the reckless exploits of a man suffering from profound psychological dysfunction is subject to question.
| |
A well researched Book by Nath Deb (Michigan)  4 Stars
November 28, 2009
This book is a superb biography of Percy Harrison Fawcett. It tells about adventure, exploration and a mysterious disappearance. Adventure of Fawcett makes this book very engaging. I was immersed in the setting through out the book. This book present life in Amazon, then and now. It also brings forth what the indigenous population tolerated from outsiders. This book reflect that David Grann did a vast amounted reading and research.
Author beautifully presents the life story of Victorian historian Fawcett. He achieved success as the explorer of Amazonian jungles and river ways. This book deals with Fawcett last faithful expedition. After reading the book he becomes fully aware of the entire career of Fawcett. Fawcett and his men had to face death several times. They had to strive against starvation, ferocious tribe's lethal diseases, snakes and other dangerous animals. Fawcett did not follow the conventions rather he made his own way. Various aspects of his life grab attention of readers. Author has took lot of pain to bring Fawcett life story on the pages.
| |
Sloppy Kindle edition by Leonid B. Gorkin (New York, NY)  1 Stars
November 24, 2009
Let me be clear: the book itself is great, but the Kindle edition is terrible. Did anybody proofread this thing? Split words, with either space or hyphen, or words glued together, are practically on every page. Seriously, Amazon, it looks like some dude just scanned the book in his basement. Buy a paper copy instead.
| |
In the grip by LCL (Grand Junction, CO) 5 Stars
November 18, 2009
For a lover of history, of the wilds, of the jungle, this book is wonderful. It is very readable and the author seizes you in his grip from the first chapter. My stomach churned with descriptions of maggots, eye-licking bees, and flesh eating infections. My mind raced with possibilities. My heart ached for his family. I simply loved the book, the story and the way the author wove his own quest into the story.
| |
Amazing book - interesting yet scary look at the Amazon by Turtle502 (Pitman, NJ USA) 5 Stars
November 14, 2009
I found this book to be amazing. It tells a bit of a story -- the mysterious disappearance of explorer Fawcett -- while also describing the mystery of the Amazon itself. After reading this book -- I'm amazed with what lies within the Amazon, but also afraid of it. It's a place I would not even want to visit!
The book does a good job at painting a picture. It goes back in time and covers the history of Fawcett -- providing a decent account of his expeditions. In this sense, it's a good biography. Simultaneously, David Grann tells his own story -- his interest in Fawcett and the mysterious disappearance of him and his party. There is no answer to this question, but you'll get answers to other mysteries raised throughout the book...none of which I will spoil here.
I especially enjoyed the descriptions of the threats that face explorers of the Amazon. The natives, wildlife, and illness are all incredibly described here...sometimes in graphic detail. As you're reading this book, you'll sometimes wonder how some of these explorers even managed to survive and walk out of the jungle. This book makes it clear -- the jungle is deadly.
This book is an easy read, and it's quite easy to get caught-up in the descriptions within a few hours. On vacation or on a plane, this book will take only a couple of hours to complete. There is nothing complex to retain from chapter to chapter. I think I enjoyed it because it's written as if I'm sitting down, listening to somebody tell an amazing story...and I just want to hear more.
If you have any interest in the Amazon, explorers, lost civilizations, or real-life mysteries -- pick this up. You won't regret it.
| |
SIMILAR PRODUCTS |
| Vanished!: Explorers Forever Lost
by Evan L. Balkan (Author)
In the best adventures, the intrepid explorer returns home to banner headlines and a hero’s welcome…but what of the men and women who don’t return home? This collection proves their stories are just as compelling. From the disappearance in Utah of cowboy roamer Everett Ruess to the loss of billionaire explorer Michael Rockefeller in the wilds of New Guinea, the tales ring with mystery, intrigue, and excitement. Whether murdered, drowned, or eaten alive, their disappearances are likely to...
| 
| Fordlandia: The Rise and Fall of Henry Ford's Forgotten Jungle City
by Greg Grandin (Author)
The stunning, never before told story of the quixotic attempt to recreate small-town America in the heart of the Amazon In 1927, Henry Ford, the richest man in the world, bought a tract of land twice the size of Delaware in the Brazilian Amazon. His intention was to grow rubber, but the project rapidly evolved into a more ambitious bid to export America itself, along with its golf courses, ice-cream shops, bandstands, indoor plumbing, and Model Ts rolling down broad streets....
| 
| The Bloody White Baron: The Extraordinary Story of the Russian Nobleman Who Became the Last Khan of Mongolia
by James Palmer (Author)
In the history of the modern world, there have been few characters more sadistic, sinister, and deeply demented as Baron Ungern-Sternberg. An anti-Semitic fanatic with a penchant for Eastern mysticism and a hatred of communists, Baron Ungern-Sternberg took over Mongolia in 1920 with a ragtag force of White Russians, Siberians, Japanese, and native Mongolians. While tormenting friend and foe alike, he dreamed of assembling a horse-borne army with which he would retake communist controlled...
| 
| Crazy for the Storm: A Memoir of Survival
by Norman Ollestad (Author)
Dad Said Ollestad, we can do it all. . . . Why do you make me do this? Because it's beautiful when it all comes together. I don't think it's ever beautiful. One day. Never. We'll see, my father said. Vamanos. From the age of three, Norman Ollestad was thrust into the world of surfing and competitive downhill skiing by the intense, charismatic father he both idolized and resented. While his friends were riding bikes,...
| 
| No Angel: My Harrowing Undercover Journey to the Inner Circle of the Hells Angels
by Jay Dobyns (Author), Nils Johnson-Shelton (Author)
Here, from Jay Dobyns, the first federal agent to infiltrate the inner circle of the outlaw Hells Angels Motorcycle Club, is the inside story of the twenty-one-month operation that almost cost him his family, his sanity, and his life.
Getting shot in the chest as a rookie agent, bartering for machine guns, throttling down the highway at 100 mph, and responding to a full-scale, bloody riot between the Hells Angels and their rivals, the Mongols–these are just a few of the high-adrenaline...
|
|
|
