The Lost City of Z: A Tale of Deadly Obsession in the Amazon , Grann - B

                                              This book tells the story of, and the much later search for, Colonel Percy Harrison Fawcett, considered the last of the great explorers of Victorian England. He was the 'David Livingstone of the Amazon' and a recipient in 1916 of a Royal Geographical Society Founder's Gold Medal. He vanished in the Amazon in 1925 at the age of 57. His objective was the lost City of Z, the famed El Dorado, the search for which had been claiming the lives of Europeans for centuries.  In the 1920's, the Amazon basin remained a vast, unknown wilderness capable of punishing and killing all who entered. Fawcett embarked with his 21-year-old son Jack and Jack's best friend, Raleigh Rimell. They sent five months of dispatches back and then were never heard from again.
Fawcett's Amazon career had begun in 1906 when the RGS sent him on a mapping expedition that involved descending from the Bolivian Andes to the floor of the jungle and transversing it for almost a year. He had an amazing genetic makeup that kept him healthy in one of the the planet's most inhospitable environments. It was as if he prospered in the jungle, where he went year after year. He was widely acclaimed and known throughout the world. He spent most of the Great War in the trenches as an artillery officer and was back in the Amazon in 1920. Financing a second post-war expedition required assistance from American journalists, financiers and philanthropists. On April 20, 1925, the three-man party departed Cuiaba, Brazil. It is now generally accepted that Indians killed the them soon thereafter.
                                             The author's 2005 pursuit of the Fawcett trail was the most recent but not the first. Fawcett's disappearance was front page news, and over the years, an estimated one hundred people have died trying to find his trail. Much of what had been the deepest jungle 80 years before has been cleared and is now part of civilization, very remote, but reachable by a four-wheel drive truck. Grann went to Xingu National Park, where he heard the local oral tradition of the death of the three men. He also met a University of Florida archaeologist who found and showed him the foundation of the lost City of Z.
                                             This book has been a best-seller, and a major motion picture based on this book was released to critical acclaim last year. I'd rate the book as very well-written and a fine summer, beach non-fiction read.