Review: The Lost City of Z by David Grann

I love a good adventure novel! Exploring the Arctic, searching for the source of the Nile, exploring the Amazon basin, all from the comfort of your local library. Most of us will never in our lives go anywhere that is truly unexplored, but I have great respect for the men (and occasionally women) who were unafraid of the unknown. In The Lost City of Z: A Tale of Deadly Obsession in the Amazon, author David Grann presents not only a great tale of adventure but also a great mystery: what happened to Colonel Percy Fawcett?

Colonel Percy Fawcett was an amateur archaeologist and adventurer who spent the early years of the 20th century exploring South American jungles. He was known for his policy of non-violence when it came to the natives; while other explorers were escorted by troops of well-armed soldiers, Fawcett traveled with a small party, brought gifts for the tribes they met, and resolved to never fire a shot. He was the inspiration for Arthur Conan Doyle’s The Lost World and Steven Spielberg’s Indiana Jones. His career ended in mystery — in 1925, accompanied by his son, Jack, and a small party of explorers, Fawcett disappeared into the Amazon in search of the lost city of Z (which may have been code for El Dorado, the City of Gold. Dozens of expeditions were launched to try and determine what happened to Fawcett and his companions. No hard evidence was ever found.

Over the years he spent exploring in the Amazon, Fawcett became convinced that there was evidence of advanced civilizations in the jungle. Although the prevailing opinion was that the natives of the area were backwards and mentally inferior to Europeans, Fawcett was impressed with the way the indigenous people were able to build societies, albeit small ones, and find food and clothing in an area most referred to as The Green Hell. He spent years researching the reports of early explorers, and in 1925, he headed off on his final expedition.

David Grann was ill equipped to go searching in the Amazon:

Let me be clear: I am not an explorer or an adventurer. I don’t climb mountains or hunt. I don’t even like to camp. I stand less than five feet nine inches tall and am nearly forty years old, with a blossoming waistline and thinning black hair. I suffer from keratoconus — a degenerative eye condition that makes it hard for me to see at night. I have a terrible sense of direction and tend to forget where I am on the subway and miss my stop in Brooklyn.

His original plan was to head to the Amazon with a couple of pairs of shorts, his sneakers and a Swiss army knife. But Grann gets caught up in the Fawcett mystery that has captivated explorers for nearly a century. The staff at the Royal Geographic Society is accustomed to dealing with “Fawcett lunatics”, who want to read his papers and follow in his footsteps, even though Fawcett explicitly requested that no rescue mission be attempted. (That was part ego; he figured that if he couldn’t find his way out, no one could.) Estimates are that more than 100 people have perished in their attempts to solve the mystery of what became of Fawcett’s band of explorers.


The Lost City of Z is both the story of Fawcett’s expedition and Grann’s obsession with it. There’s some history, a little archaeology, and plenty of adventure. It’s a terrific story about a larger-than-life character who inspired great writers and touched millions of newspaper readers with the stories of his adventures. Perhaps the greatest tribute to Fawcett is that his final chapter remains a mystery.

My copy of The Lost City of Z: A Tale of Deadly Obsession in the Amazon was an Advanced Reader Copy; get your copy at Amazon.com.

Deep Survival: Who Lives, Who Dies and Why by Laurence Gonzales

I have written before about my love of travel and adventure books. Often, these are more accurately about misadventure - an expedition gone wrong, a plane crash, a shipwreck. Some people live, some die. Why did Robert Falcon Scott lose every member of his expedition, while Edmund Shackleton brought all of his crewmembers - including a stowaway - home safely? Why do experienced climbers die on "beginner" mountains while four-year-olds, lost in the woods, are found unharmed? Deep Survival attempts to answer some of those questions by looking at what goes into making someone a survivor.

Gonzales has lived a fascinating life and has ample experience to bring to this subject, but this isn't a book about survival techniques. You won't find tips on how to navigate by the stars, how to find water in the desert or keep warm in a blizzard. You will learn how we create emotional bookmarks, how we create mental maps that guide us, even when we don't realize it. You'll learn the importance of Positive Mental Attitude, even if the experts can't tell you exactly what comprises that attitude. These things are actually far more important, because they are lessons that you can apply to your everyday life.

The accident stories are enlightening - it's obvious that we don't always take "the wilderness" very seriously. He talks with John Gray, the only guide licensed to take backpackers into Glacier National Park:

People set off from their Winnebagos in the vast Logan Pass Visitor Center parking lot, a place where it can snow 12 inches in August. They walk with their kids and their cameras right out along the Continental Divide for the beautiful views. "They're just clueless when they start," he said to me. "They don't even realize that being in the mountains you have to be prepared. A ton of people take off up there without proper equipment and it rapidly becomes a life-threatening situation. This year at Granite Park Chalet we gave away every garbage bag we had to people who had come up without proper clothes and were hypothermic. We could warm them up, but the garbage bag was the only thing we could give them for the walk back down."

We tend to treat the great outdoors like an amusement park. There are national park horror stories about people want to have their kid's picture taken with a bear or on the back of a moose. Even Gonzales talks about leaving a ski lodge, planning on a short nature walk, and nearly getting caught in a 2-day ice storm because they didn't turn back when the weather got suddenly threatening. He relates a conversation with a lifeguard on a beach in Hawaii, where he was planning to dive right in and enjoy the surf: turns out, he was walking through a particularly dangerous area, and the lifeguard explained how he could have easily ended up shredded on the nearby lava rocks. Obviously, the first steps to surviving are knowing where you are and where you're going and paying attention to the world around you.

I've already recommended this book to colleagues at work. In fact, it immediately occurred to me that you could easily turn these ideas into useful suggestions at the office; the same ideas can also apply to your personal life. We create an emotional bookmark when something goes well - that feeling of elation and excitement when you close a big sale or kiss a new lover isn't all that different from the feeling of riding a monster wave or reaching the summit of mountain. But sometimes we try to recreate that feeling, we follow that mental map, even though our current terrain is very different. Instead of adjusting our map to reality, we push blindly forward, trying to make reality fit our map, with tragic consequences.

Even without the pop psychology slant on it, the book is full of interesting stories about how people manage to survive in the most difficult circumstances. It's the story behind the stories, and it's certain to inform my reading of other adventure literature. You can order Deep Survival on Amazon.com.

Have you been lost in the wilderness or have a survival story of your own?

The White Mary by Kira Salak

I have always been a fan of travel and adventure books, both fiction and non-fiction, which is what drew me to Kira Salak’s book, The White Mary. Although the book is a work of fiction, she drew on her long experience as a travel journalist to present a story full of detail and vibrant description. It is immediately apparent that the author hasn’t just watched a National Geographic Special on Papua New Guinea, she has actually been through that jungle. It adds tremendously to the story.

Marika is a travel journalist who has been to some of the most violent and dangerous places on the planet. She lost her father when she was very young; he was executed in Czechoslovakia as a spy. She lost her mother to mental illness – more gradual, but no less painful. She has risked her life countless times in her need to tell a story. That need and that lifestyle have kept her separated from other people. Separation is comfortable for her, since so many important people in her life have left her.

Her current project is the biography of one of her heroes, the man who inspired her to become a journalist, Robert Lewis. While reviewing some background materials, she finds a letter from a missionary who claims to have seen Lewis recently, in Papua New Guinea. Fleeing problems in her personal life, Marika heads for PNG, looking for her own Holy Grail.

There are a few things that bother me in this book. Marika is a bit of a superwoman – no matter what the jungle throws at her, she keeps on going. Seb, her boyfriend back in Boston, is too good to be true. He’s handsome, rich, single, understanding…absolutely perfect. Her native guide, Tobo, is also too good to be true, never deserting her, even when she’s obviously a little nuts.

Still, this is a great tale of adventure, a story about finding yourself, a story about the futility of running from your problems.

My copy of The White Mary was an Advance Reader Copy. You can preorder your copy here.

Victorine, by Catherine Texier

Victorine, a young married woman with two children, leaves an unhappy marriage and escapes to Indochina with her childhood sweetheart. They build a life there in the hot, humid weather, exotic flowers and swirls of opium smoke. Then, after 10 years, she goes back to France, back to her husband. She starts out planning to finally end things with him - ask for a divorce, explain things to her children - but she stays, has another child, lives out her life. I absolutely loved this first section of the book. Her descriptions of Indochina - the country, the people, the difficulties of adjusting to the climate and the language - are marvelous.

Spoilers ahead...

The frustrating thing about the book is that 95% of the story deals with her decision to leave her husband and her life in Indochina; only a small fraction at the very end deals with her return. There is no mention of how she was received by her old friends and neighbors, how she explained her absence, how she made peace - if she made peace - with her children. She and her husband had another child, but they also separated: there is virtually no explanation for that and there are no details, no explanations. She continued to see her childhood sweetheart after her marriage broke up - only a few brief paragraphs explain all of this. Although she saw him every summer from the time she and her husband separated until he died at age 62 (only 3 years before the story takes place), there is no explanation of how this started, why it continued, why they never married. If you like a story with closure and all the loose ends wrapped up, avoid this book.

When I originally wrote this review, I'd just finished the audiobook, which was an abridged version. After reviewing the full version, my main criticisms are still the same - there isn't enough of a wrap-up. I am not one to require that every detail by explained, but there were far too many holes in this one for my taste.