Year in (Book) Review: The Lost City of Z

A couple of debatably interesting things about me:

1. I think I can do pretty much anything.
2. I have rarely, if ever, actually done much of anything.

I'm speaking mostly on brave and adventurous type things, rather than general life accomplishments. I am that strange breed of person who sees anything, hears about anything, dreams up anything, and says, "Well shit. I could do that," with no real resume to back up said claim. I am, therefore and by definition, a blustery person. I have a tremendous wanderlust and an unused passport. (That’s not hyperbole, that’s true.)

The first time I questioned this -- myself, you might say -- was a few years ago, about three pages into Jon Krakauer's Into Thin Air. (He is best known, I think, for his book Into the Wild, which became such a successful film. Jon is, by definition, not blustery. Read: he actually walks the walk, and then talks about it. I just keep talking.) I have no idea why these kinds of adventure books are so interesting to me, but I eat them up. Somewhere in what I'm pretty sure was still the introduction of Into Thin Air, an account of a tragic and dangerous 1996 summiting of Mt. Everest, Mr. Krakauer started describing the shit -- literally, I'm not just being a potty mouth -- that was running through the streets of the town on the way to base camp. Meaning, pretty much before anything approaching adventure, really still hundreds of miles away from adventure, there was poop on the ground. I read that far and said, "I'm out." Nothing he wrote in the following pages -- nothing in the retelling of frostbite, of freezing to death where you stood, of falling thousands of feet -- convinced me that a vigorous mountain climb was in my future. Some people are just braver than me. I'm not happy to admit that, but seeing as I've only skydived (skydove?) once and that was just to impress a boy, I don't land in any annuls on the bravest people ever. But they are inexplicably fascinating to me.

So, having exhausted all of Krakauer's adventure tales (I'm starting to suspect he's just a braggart.)(No, not really, I’m just jealous. Please read them, they’re excellent.), I picked up David Grann's The Lost City of Z: A Tale of Deadly Obsession in the Amazon. Grann is a writer for The New Yorker and got himself so fascinated by the subject of this book, a 1920s explorer who went and got himself disappeared, that he trekked off to the Amazon himself in search of answers. And probably bones. That's cool.

I didn’t find myself as drawn in as I did with Krakauer’s books, but it’s still pretty damn exhilarating to think of some guy in 1925 climbing onto a boat in Hoboken (yay Hoboken!) and landing, over and over again, in Brazil, searching for the mythical (maybe) city of Z/El Dorado/heaven on Earth. It’s educational. It’s historical. It’s exceptionally well-researched. Telling the story from several different perspectives -- author Grann’s, subject Percy Fawcett’s, and a couple of other “Fawcett freaks” -- the book draws a very vivid picture of what this territory must’ve been like in the early part of the 20th century: completely daunting terrain, little to no method of communicating with the outside world, hostiles who are probably more confused than angry about why some really tall, really pale dude just showed up in their back yard. Fawcett is almost a caricature of an old-fashioned explorer, complete with safari hat and flouncy pants and a beard, except that he’s real. He’s probably the one who formed that “explorer” image into our heads, actually. Creating a wonderfully complete picture of his life, Grann introduces us to Fawcett’s marriage, his work relationships, his followers, his children, and his ancestors, all of whom have a unique take on the man. He seemed to me equal parts selfish, brave, foolish, driven, stubborn, and called to something higher. I kind of love a guy like that.

In other words, the kind of guy who hears about something and says, “Well, shit. I could do that.” And then actually does.