The Lost City of ZA Tale of Deadly Obsession in the Amazon
- Narrated by
Mark Deakins
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Audiobook Download Information
- Edition:
- Unabridged (Random House Audio)
- Length:
- 10 hours, 4 minutes
- File Size:
- 276 MB (8 files)
- Published:
- February 2009
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Review by Molly Young, eMusic
Colonel Percy Harrison Fawcett was a real-life British explorer straight out of Indiana Jones. Strapping, eerie-eyed and obsessive, he was, according to David Grann, "the last of the great Victorian explorers who ventured into uncharted realms with little more than a machete, a compass, and an almost divine sense of purpose." In The Lost City of Z, Grann tells the story of Fawcett's quest to locate an ancient kingdom rumored to be located in the Amazon jungle. At a time when maps of the globe still contained swaths of blank space marked "unexplored", it was the imperative of men like Fawcett, a member of the Royal Geographical Society, to go forth and conquer.
It was hardly a glamorous job. On his many treks through the Amazon, Fawcett encountered skin-eating insects, murderous natives, vampire bats and nauseating parasites. He redrew the map of South America along the way, and continued to hunt down the mythical Z. When Fawcett vanished in 1925, the mystery of the expedition captivated a global audience. His fate — whether death, assimilation into a jungle tribe, or discovery of Z — has never been ascertained.
Fawcett is one of two protagonists in The Lost City of Z. The other is Grann himself, a New Yorker staff writer who divides chapters between Fawcett's account of the quest (reconstructed through diaries and logbooks) and his own process of researching and traveling to the coordinates where Fawcett was last seen. Grann's journalistic rigor and charming personal journey provides structural support for Fawcett's fantastical adventures, yielding a true-life adventure romp of occasionally Biblical proportions.
Quotes from the Critics
"Grann has an extraordinary sense of pacing, and his scenes of forest adventure are dispatched in passages of swift, arresting simplicity." - Bookforum
"The reader is taken just as close to Grann as the author is to Fawcett - tantalizingly close but never touching. His findings give us as complete a picture of the city of Z as we're likely to get, even if Fawcett forever remains brilliantly and maddeningly nowhere to be seen." - Los Angeles Times
"...Grann provides an in-depth, captivating character study that has the relentless energy of a classic adventure tale." - Publishers Weekly
"[THE LOST CITY OF Z] is a powerful narrative, stiff lipped and Victorian at the edges, as if one of those stern men of Conrad had found himself trapped in a novel by Garcia Marquez." - New York Times Book Review
"What makes Mr. Grann's telling of the story so captivating is that he decides not simply to go off in search of yet more relics of our absent hero -- but to go off himself in search of the city that Fawcett was looking for so heroically when he suddenly went AWOL." - Wall Street Journal
"THE LOST CITY OF Z...recounts Fawcett's expeditions with all the pace of a white-knuckle adventure story. The book is a model of suspense and concision....Although [the] story cuts through 100 years of complicated history, Grann follows its twists and turns admirably. Thoroughly researched, vividly told, this is a thrill ride from start to finish." - Washington Post
"As writer David Grann makes abundantly clear in this fascinating, epic story of exploration and obsession, the lethal attraction of the Amazon mystery remains strong...[He] brilliantly re-creates Fawcett's perilous Amazon expeditions, especially what is known of his ill-fated 1925 journey." - Boston Globe
"THE LOST CITY OF Z is at once a biography, a detective story and a wonderfully vivid piece of travel writing....[It] reads with all the pace and excitement of a movie thriller and all the verisimilitude and detail of firsthand reportage, and it seems almost surely destined for a secure perch on the best-seller lists." - New York Times
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