The Lost City of Z

The Lost City of Z is David Grann's 2009 debut narrative non-fiction book, the New Yorker staff writer's first book before Killers of the Flower Moon and The Wager and the work that established the patient documentary-research-into-thriller-paced narrative method that has defined his subsequent catalog. The structural premise is Percy Harrison Fawcett, the British explorer who disappeared with his elder son Jack and his son's friend Raleigh Rimell in the Amazon rainforest in May 1925 while searching for a lost ancient civilization he called Z. Grann runs three threads: Fawcett's actual biographical-and-expedition record across the previous quarter century of British Royal Geographical Society Amazon exploration (Fawcett made eight major expeditions between 1906 and 1925), the broader Amazon-exploration-and-misadventure historical record around Fawcett's contemporaries, and Grann's own 2005 personal trip into Brazil to attempt to retrace Fawcett's final expedition's actual route.

Grann's structural method is the patient documentary-and-archival research that he would later refine across Killers of the Flower Moon and The Wager. The Fawcett-family-archive material (Grann obtained extensive access to the Royal Geographical Society Fawcett papers and to the family's private correspondence) is the structural advantage that lifts the book above its previous-generation Amazon-explorer-non-fiction shelf. The Michael Heckenberger anthropological-research chapter in the back third (the University of Florida anthropologist whose Upper Xingu archaeological work has documented the substantial pre-Columbian urban civilization that Fawcett was actually looking for, and that the broader contemporary Amazon-civilization scholarship has confirmed exists) is the structural payoff and the part of the book that delivers the contemporary historical-archaeological argument the title points toward.

Recommended as required contemporary American narrative non-fiction reading, as the structural David Grann entry point for readers coming to him before Killers of the Flower Moon and The Wager, and as one of the canonical contemporary American Amazon-exploration non-fiction books. The 2017 James Gray film adaptation with Charlie Hunnam, Robert Pattinson, and Sienna Miller extended the readership. The Mark Deakins audiobook is the definitive audio production. Five stars without reservation.