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What it argues
David Grann's account of the British explorer Percy Fawcett's disappearance in the Amazon in 1925 — and of Grann's own journey into the jungle to investigate — is one of the most compelling works of narrative journalism of the 2000s. Fawcett was a larger-than-life Edwardian adventurer who had spent decades mapping the unmapped regions of South America and who became convinced, toward the end of his career, that a lost city of advanced civilization existed somewhere in the Mato Grosso. He called it Z. In 1925 he set off with his son Jack and a friend to find it. None of them was ever seen again.
The book alternates between Fawcett's story — reconstructed from his diaries, letters, and the accounts of people who knew him — and Grann's own investigation, which eventually takes him into the Amazon himself, an experience he approaches with frank anxiety about his sedentary journalist's body and complete lack of wilderness skills. This double narrative is the book's structural cleverness: by placing himself in the jungle, Grann can make visceral the conditions that Fawcett navigated without equipment and with blithe confidence.
What it gets right
- 1.
Obsession can produce both disaster and insight. Fawcett's single-minded pursuit of Z destroyed him, but his intuition about Amazonian civilization is now supported by archaeological evidence.
- 2.
The Amazon has consumed hundreds of searchers for Fawcett. Each expedition into the jungle demonstrates what Fawcett was up against and what his searchers underestimated.
- 3.
Pre-Columbian Amazonian civilizations were more complex and extensive than twentieth-century anthropology assumed. The book captures a genuine historical revision in progress.
What it covers
Who wrote it
David Grann is a staff writer at The New Yorker and one of the preeminent practitioners of American narrative nonfiction. Born in New York City in 1967, he is the author of The Lost City of Z, Killers of the Flower Moon, The Wager, and The White Darkness. His books combine deep archival research with first-person investigation and are noted for their pacing, their attention to historical context, and their willingness to acknowledge what cannot be known. Killers of the Flower Moon was adapted into a major film by Martin Scorsese in 2023.
