Men's Journal

By Jonathan Miles

Just when you thought all the great exploration stories had been told, all the bodies located and riddles solved, all the here-be-dragons blanks on the map defanged by Google Earth, along comes David Grann’s The Lost City of Z: A Tale of Deadly Obsession in the Amazon. Grann, a New Yorker staff writer, dives headlong into the Amazon basin to exhume the story (if not the body) of explorer Percy Fawcett, who vanished in 1925 while searching for a fabled lost city that he called Z and others called — maybe you’ve heard of it — El Dorado. Fawcett was a larger-than-life adventurer out of an Arthur Conan Doyle novel (in fact Fawcett’s expeditions were the model for Conan Doyle’s The Lost World). Grann, who stumbled upon a hidden trove of Fawcett’s log books and diaries, weaves a gung-ho bio into an account of his own nebbishy efforts to settle the explorer’s fate. (Quite an effort, as 100 other Fawcett-hunters have died or disappeared in the Amazon, making the explorer’s final whereabouts as much tar pit as mystery.) Yet there’s more riding on Grann’s quest than the fate of an old pith-helmeted white guy. “Scientists have assumed that no complex civilization could have emerged in so hostile a human environment,” he writes, meaning that discovering Z — which Fawcett thought he was close to doing — would upturn many of our theories about ancient peoples and the long story of humanity. Now that’s cause for obsession.

This article originally appeared in the February 2009 issue of Men’s Journal.