This has been sitting in my Overdrive TBR list for quite some time, but a recent episode on Dark Histories on this very topic spurred me to finally borrow it. If you’ve listened to the episode, there’s a lot of information overlap, but if you haven’t, The Lost City of Z is an entertaining introduction to the life of Percy Fawcett and what he called “Z”.

The Lost City of Z takes a dual narrative approach – for most of the book, the account of Fawcett’s life is alternated with Grann’s preparations to go to the Amazon and follow the footsteps of Fawcett. Unfortunately, I don’t think that narrative works very well. Grann’s chapters are much shorter and have less information compared to the biography of Fawcett. While the aim of this structure is to have Grann’s journey mirror Fawcett’s, Grann’s chapters felt like they broke the flow of Fawcett’s story instead.

But if you can get past the slightly jumpy narrative, the story of Fawcett’s life was fascinating. He was an explorer, often compared to Livingstone, and braved many dangerous journeys. But over the course of his trips, he came to believe in an ancient lost city named Z, and disillusioned by WWI, decided to stake everything on one last trip to find the city.

There is a lot of information packed in this book, but I do wish that there was just a bit more. For example, what are the hieroglyphics that Fawcett copied from Manuscript 512? The book does mention the manuscript and give an overview of its history, but we don’t get much more information about the most intriguing parts – does anyone have a hypothesis of what these hieroglyphics mean?

Overall, though, this was a great introduction to the exciting (and tragic) life of Percy Fawcett. I am not a fan of the structure of the book, though I did like the last part when Grann finally visits the Amazon, but if you’re looking for information on lost cities and explorers, this is the book for you.

Featured Image: Background photo from Canva