An Explorer Drawn to, and Eventually Swallowed by, the Amazon By MICHIKO KAKUTANI writing in The New York Times, March 16, 2009

Imagine a swashbuckling British version of Indiana Jones with a mustache and maybe a pith helmet and a fondness for talking about his “Destiny,” and you get a pretty good picture of Col. Percy Harrison Fawcett.

David Grann (pic left) by Matt Richman

THE LOST CITY OF Z
A Tale of Deadly Obsession in the Amazon
By David Grann
Illustrated. 339 pages. Doubleday. $27.50.
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In the early decades of the 20th century this former spy turned explorer extraordinaire made a series of daring expeditions into the heart of the darkest Amazon, where, as David Grann’s entertaining new book, “The Lost City of Z,” recounts, he faced hostile tribesmen armed with blow darts and poison arrows, and encountered crocodiles, jaguars, piranhas, vampire bats, giant anacondas and every pestilent insect imaginable, from cyanide-squirting millipedes to “sauba ants” that could reduce a man’s clothes “to threads in a single night” to “eye lickers” that invade the pupils.
As Mr. Grann, a writer for The New Yorker, explains in these pages, Fawcett was renowned in his day as the “David Livingstone of the Amazon” — “the last of the great Victorian explorers who ventured into uncharted realms with little more than a machete, a compass and an almost divine sense of purpose.”
“For nearly two decades,” Mr. Grann observes, stories of Fawcett’s adventures “captivated the public’s imagination: how he had survived in the South American wilderness without contact with the outside world” and “how he emerged with maps of regions from which no previous expedition had returned.”
But Fawcett and his two companions on a 1925 expedition, his 21-year-old son, Jack, and Jack’s best friend, Raleigh Rimell, never returned from that trip. In 1953, nearly three decades after his mysterious disappearance, The London Geographical Journal declared: “Fawcett marked the end of an age. One might almost call him the last of the individualist explorers. The day of the aeroplane, the radio, the organized and heavily financed modern expedition had not arrived. With him, it was the heroic story of a man against the forest.”

“The Lost City of Z” is at once a biography, a detective story and a wonderfully vivid piece of travel writing that combines Bruce Chatwinesque powers of observation with a Waugh-like sense of the absurd. Mr. Grann treats us to a harrowing reconstruction of Fawcett’s forays into the Amazonian jungle, as well as an evocative rendering of the vanished age of exploration, which witnessed feats like Livingstone’s finding of Victoria Falls, the Amundsen and Scott expeditions to the South Pole and Hiram Bingham’s discovery of the lost city of Machu Picchu.

Read the full review at NYT online.