The Lost City of Z: A Tale of Deadly Obsession in the Amazon

Physical Copy:

Audiobook:

By: David Grann

Rating: A

My wife and I rented the movie a little while back. There’s only so much Netflix you can watch. We found the movie recommendation off of a top movies to rent google search. It was released in 2016 and had a pretty decent cast so we gave it a shot. It was a good time but we both wanted more.

As a kid, I loved the movie “Congo”. (PS. Don’t watch it now! You will be severely disappointed.) I read the Michael Crichton book a few years back and it was so much fun. Books on discovery and adventure in the unknown parts of our world scratches an itch I forget about too often.

This book was great. Much more detail than the movie gives. The author goes on his own adventure tracing the steps of Colonel Percy Fawcett, a British surveyor from the late 1800s to early 1900s.

Percy was a career military man who was searching for glory to improve his family’s name. He was assigned to the Amazon to go on a surveying mission. It was not a sought after mission. But it led to his life’s ambition. On the first surveying mission, he found evidence of a lost civilization that would rewrite our history books deep within the Amazon jungle.

The rest of his life led mission after mission back to the jungle. Every mission was full of mishap after mishap that led to incredible stories. The entire world followed his adventures in newspapers and magazines.

He eventually went missing in the jungle in 1925. BUT there is much controversy on what happened. Did he starve, get captured by indegenous people, or find the city and refuse to leave? The book recounts his adventures and looks into each theory.

It was a great time.

Recommended.

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What adventure have you always wanted to go on?