Decades after his final dispatch from the jungle, Fawcett’s wife and remaining family (he took his teenage son Jack with him) continued to believe that one day he would emerge from the jungle with a tale so epic that only Homer could tell it properly.

The high rate of fatality of these epidemics disrupted the people and their society: in only a few years, they were so devastated by disease that they had virtually died out. Esta búsqueda duró varios siglos en los que se cobró centenares de vidas y enloqueció a unos cuantos (Aguirre). This is a book to make you think about what man is: his determination, his understanding, his folly, his ego, and how some of us have these things in greater measure than others.What could be better--obsession, mystery, deadly insects, shrunken heads, suppurating wounds, hostile tribesmen--all for us to savor in our homes, safely before the fire. Author David Grann juggles these stories well, never dropping the main story, at least no more than necessary to incorporate the interesting details from these off-shoot tales that help the reader to better understand the mindset of the times or to underscore the perils of such treks into the unknown. Apparently, there is a PBS special on Fawcett and this last expedition and I wouldn't mind watching it based on reading this book so evidently it wasn't a total loss. You can find a bit of similarity to the famous biography of Christopher McCandless, and that’s where the tale shines, too. Grann brings the exploratory culture of the early 1900s to life through tales of warm weather, mysterious jungle, and some truly gnarly infectious diseases.

The author gets some measure of closure, on both what happened to Fawcett and on the existence of Z. As you read The Lost City of Z you begin to form the opinion that "dead" is the only possible outcome for anyone foolish enough to set foot in the jungle.

The inspiration behind Arthur Conan Doyle’s novel The Lost World, Colonel Percy Harrison Fawcett was among the last of a long line of British gentlemen explorers. By his own journalistic autopsis, he vindicates not only Fawcett’s obsession with Z but his own obsession with Fawcett. For decades explorers and scientists have tried to find evidence of Fawcett's party and of the Lost City of Z. But pessimists have convinced the best of us that being an explorer sounds much better in the pages, for struggling to survive inside a forest with the probability of being jeopardized almost tending to one, isn’t really something most of us “civilians” will crave for.

La leyenda de El Dorado nace cuando los conquistadores españoles buscaban las riquezas que se suponía había en el nuevo mundo y estaba sustentada por relatos de los indios, ya sea por antiguas creencias suyas, ya sea por sacarse de encima al pesado conquistador que solo quería oro. Killers of the Flower Moon was a finalist for The National Book Award and won an Edgar Allan Poe Award.Grann's descriptions of the jungle's deprivations felt to me like watching a David Attenborough nature program in Feel-o-vision. Seriously though, as noted in my review of Candice Millard's The River of Doubt: Theodore Roosevelt's Darkest Journey, and further evidenced in reading this tale, the jungle is a punishing, dangerous place. Its quiet, shaded halls of leafy opulence were not a sanctuary, but rather the greatest natural battlefield anywhere on the planet, hosting an unremitting and remorseless fight for survival that occupied every single one of its inhabitants, every minute of every day. and we’re back with the author in first person again as he documents what will ultimately prove to be only his own pointless, journalistic narcissism.