Avoid the animals, the disease, the bugs, injury, and starving to death, and you’re still screwed when hostile natives catch you, eat you and use your skull as their favorite coffee mug. The earliest conquistadors left records of their glimpses of this civilization, but by the time they tried to explore the rainforest again, the indigenous people were all but gone. Anyone who enjoyed Douglas Preston's recent book, The Lost City of the Monkey God, will also enjoy this book. It’s why I’ve switched to taking in the bulk of my nonfiction through audio: I just find it easier to get through in that medium.

Over eighteen thousand feet high in the Andes, amid snow and clouds, it emerges through a rocky seam--a trickle of crystal water. His superb writing style, his skills as a reporter, his masterful use of historical and scientific documents, and his stunning storytelling ability are on full display here, producing an endlessly absorbing tale about a magical subject that captivates from start to finish. His quest for the truth, and his stunning discoveries about Fawcett’s fate and "Z," form the heart of this enthralling narrative. At times, I had to remind myself that everything in this story is true: a movie star really was abducted by Indians; there were cannibals, ruins, secret maps, and spies; explorers died from starvation, disease, attacks by wild animals, and poisonous arrows; and at stake amid the adventure and death was the very understanding of the Americas before Christopher Columbus came ashore in the New World.Ninety-year old undocumented human remains which in the best of conditions would surely have vanished within the first decade of disappearance? The narrative in River of Doubt was more focused than this novel, but Millard was talking about one trip, not multiple trips or explorers. B. Cooper as tales unravel of the many minds and/or lives lost in attempts to solve the mystery of a missing man. For the next eighty years, hordes of explorers plunged into the jungle, trying to find evidence of Fawcett's party or Z. Unfortunately, as with many explorers, his belief in himself, his obsession with his quest and his feelings of invincibility eventually caught up with him -- and he took two young men with him.

For nearly a century, explorers have sacrificed everything, even their lives, to find the City of Z. Fawcett would probably be appalled by any comparisons with Roosevelt, but they did both take their sons into the unforgiving tropical environs and raise the hackles of the culturally-competent Marechal Cândido Mariano da Silva Rondon (below yucking it up with an indigenous peoples). I also respect those who have set out to explore the jungle — many of whom have died or disappeared.And I don’t want to hear about global warming or any nonsense about generating most of the world’s oxygen. The Kalapalos observed smoke from Fawcett's expedition's campfire each evening for five days before it disappeared. He is short, pudgy, and not athletic, but he is helped by some modern conveniences that Fawcett would have snickered at the prospect of using. For centuries Europeans believed the world's largest jungle concealed the glittering kingdom of El Dorado.

A really enjoyable, engaging read of a vanished civilisation, by which I mean crazed Edwardian explorers obviously. Then there’s the piranha, the electric eels, the anacondas, the coral snakes or the poisonous toads that are so toxic that one of them could kill a hundred people. The high rate of fatality of these epidemics disrupted the people and their society: in only a few years, they were so devastated by disease that they had virtually died out.The book reads pretty much the same way, more like a rigorous piece of unflavored yet salubrious dish, that may or may not be enjoyed by all. Indeed, some might say that explorers become explorers precisely because they have a streak of unsociability and a need to remove themselves at regular intervals as far as possible from their fellow men. More than that, however, he discovers—and it would be unfair to a splendid, suspenseful book to say just how—what a few jungle anthropologists have come to believe is the surprising truth about Z.