It’s been a very long summer of traveling for me and the family, and although I’ve fallen behind in my reviewing over the past few months, I’ve kept on reading! This book is on our Siblings’ Book Club list this year, and it’s one I’d been looking forward to reading. As a true historical mystery of survival and treasure hunting, it absolutely did not disappoint.

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The Genre of Historical Journalism

David Grann is no new author to us. Just last year, we read his more recent books Killers of the Flower Moon (2017) and The Wager (2023). While I preferred the second book over the first, both were hard-hitting epics of historical journalism that opened new vistas of what small, forgotten pockets of humans have endured.

His is an incredible genre and one I’m sure we’ll continue pursuing in our annual reads. Other authors skilled in this vein are David McCullough, Erik Larson and Simon Winchester. I’d love to discover more, if you know of any!

Quick Summary of the Book

The Lost City of Z traces the footsteps of one Percy Harrison Fawcett, last in a long line of solo adventurers and explorers from the Royal Geographic Society seeking to map the unknown reaches of Planet Earth. I love how Grann describes him:

Fawcett, like many other Victorian explorers, was a professional dabbler who, in addition to being self-styled geographer and archaeologist was a talented artist…and shipbuilder. (16)

Central to his explorations was the upper reaches of Amazonia, but not those portions touched by rivers and waterways. His method was instead to trek deep onto the jungles, those unforgiving “deserts” of trees where lurked untold diseases, plagues, and violent tribes. He sought to map the region but also to uncover the lost civilization that he knew must have existed, a fabled land that he dubbed simply “Z.”

Grann traces the movements of Fawcett, the “David Livingstone of the Amazon” (8) chronologically through his career, also peppering his chapters with important historical notes and anecdotes, as well as his own personal trek through the same region in Fawcett’s footsteps. It’s truly a book of adventure and education that kept me engaged throughout.

Some Favorite Scenes and Connections

Chapter 8 is among my favorite in the book, as it describes many of the natural perils this terrible terrain contains, namely the insects and fish. He paints it as a region one should never, EVER visit—and yet humans have been living and thriving there for thousands of years! Chapter 12 also exemplifies the terrors of this region through the case of James Murray, a Fawcett companion who had once traveled Antarctica with Sir Earnest Shackleton but who proved unprepared for the tortures of humid jungle trekking.

I also enjoyed the interesting crossover of personalities about whom I’ve been reading elsewhere, most notably Arthur Conan Doyle a mystic séance lover. Fawcett’s surviving family hoped to discover whether or not he and his partners had survived their disappearance, and they thus turned to psychics and séances. Doyle himself was involved to an extent, which intrigued me, since this strange hobby of the Sherlock Holmes author was also a key component of the Henry Houdini biography Escape! by Sid Fleischman, which I also read this summer. Prior to this, I was unaware of how strong such spiritism was in the early 20th century, especially among celebrities. It reminds me of an early Scientology.

Less surprising was the connection between The Lost City of Z and the explorations of Teddy Roosevelt down The River of Doubt. Similarly, not long before Fawcett’s most important South American explorations, the U.S. had completed the construction of the Panama Canal, and Roosevelt had been making his own headlines as amateur explorer.

There were so many other interesting connections to other books and authors I’ve loved: H. Rider Haggard, Rudyard Kipling, and Arthur Conan Doyle’s other works like The Lost World, loosely based on the explorations of Fawcett himself. It also touches on the ancient history of the America’s in a vein similar to 1491 by Charles C. Mann (2005). Grann’s book really is designed for people like me in mind, those of us who love a strapping, turn-of-the-century adventure novel about treasure hunting and discovery. I know I might not have survived one of his months-long jungle hikes myself, but I’m an explorer at heart, and this question from Fawcett about treasure hunting really resonates with me:

Did the hound find its greatest pleasure in the hunt or in the killing of its quarry? (43)

Conclusion

This was an excellent read, and it’s definitely my favorite Grann book so far. I’m not yet sure how everyone else in the book club felt about it, but I can’t image they’d have much to say against it!

If you’re looking for an historical, non-fiction, armchair adventure this winter, look no further than this.

©2025 E.T.

Read More from David Grann:

• The Lost City of Z (2005)
• Killers of the Flower Moon (2017)
• The Wager (2023)