Book Review: The Lost City of Z by David Grann

My grandma and I were reading buddies. Whenever I visited her, we'd talk about what the other was reading, or had read recently, and how was it, and so forth, even though we just about never read the same things. She always said that reading was one of the things that kept her going into old age - one of her favorite parts about reading was that you could immerse yourself in another place, or another culture, or another time and feel what it was like even without leaving your house. Personally, that had generally not been a major factor in my motivation for reading, but reading something like this makes you understand why that rationale can be so powerful.

That's only one of the reasons this book is so fascinating - the adventure in the Amazon aspect. Everything described about the amazon area was so interesting I found myself looking up more online later, and wanting to find another book that talks about the area - my imagination was piqued by all the unique dangers and experiences of the amazon - I felt like a little boy reading an adventure novel (I guess it's not that far away from truth) - undiscovered tribes, with thousands of unique languages who could befriend explorers, take them prisoner and eat them (yes, it sounds like an old-fashioned belief, but apparently a couple of the tribes actually practiced cannibalistic behavior) along with untold ways leading to an untimely death - several different insects alone, many poisonous animals, starvation, and of course sheer mental insanity.

Another reason to read the book is the mystery - there's a degree of suspense to unraveling what actually happened to Percy Fawcett, the protagonist of the non-fiction work - an incredibly riveting figure - unrelentingly loyal to a few, showing no fear in the face of these dangers, but also impossible to get along with for anyone who didn't share his one-dimensional keep-going never-stop mentality. There are even various little clues - journal entries, some of them possibly coded, rumors and stories from local tribes, and little bits, possibly true, or possibly not from the different explorers who have followed him in - at least those who survived.

A third (I'd say last, but that implies a more limited list than I'd like - maybe I'll think of more later?) is the reason I end up most often end up reading non-fiction books - the history. The shift in anthropological ideas, and how Fawcett was both ahead of time in his treatment of the natives, and still a member of his time with his generally noble savage beliefs. The notion of exploration, of how to deal with something completely new is compelling, and the amazon in the early 20th century (and probably to a lesser extent today) is particularly interesting because of how it was the last truly unexplored place on the planet, and that even as technology outside kept improving, explorers struggled to make use of that technology within the jungle. There's some strange romance to the notion that a small group of explorers could succeed where a giant battalion could not, and to the idea that even to this day there's some unexplored piece left.

And it kind of teases you - because in the end, there wasn't realy an answer, even though reading the whole way you kind of knew there wouldn't be - and to some extent, that's probably the point - all these people looking for definitive, certain, iron-clad proof that just is never going to exist as hard as it is to except, and it is hard, but it's a little less hard because of how enjoyable for us (not for them surely - with the malaria, and the yellow fever, and bugs, and the pirhanas and whatnot) the journey is getting there.