The Lost City of Z by David Grann

The Lost City of Z tells the story, simultaneously, of both Colonel Fawcett's expedition in the 1920's to find the fabled city of El Dorado in the Amazon, and the author's attempts to find out what happened to Fawcett, one of the greatest explorers of the age, who disappeared along with his son and his son's best friend, who had both gone along for the ride, so to speak.

The book paints a fascinating picture of the whole pursuit of knowledge thing that was going on at the time (late 19th, early 20th Century), and you really do marvel at the feats accomplished. At the same time, there's a certain cold-bloodedness inherent in the way that the explorers seemed to view their entourages as expendables during the course of their journeys, simply accepting that loss of life was the cost of increased knowledge of what lay in the blank areas of the maps.

Anyway, having given us a potted history of Fawcett's accomplishments, the narrative also tries to paint the backdrop to Fawcett's developing obsession over the Lost City of Z, and in so doing also explains how against the backdrop of such miraculous technologies as radio and phonographs, people's credibility with regard to mediums, the supernatural and the mystic also increased, even amongst such people as the rationalists as trained by the Royal Geographic Society.

The Lost City would prove Fawcett's undoing... or at least, it'd prove to be the cause of his disappearance. Grann, some 80 years later, does a fair bit of research to try and find out what path Fawcett would've taken (the explorers at the time guarded such information jealously, so as not to lose discoveries to rivals), in an attempt to piece together the party's fate.

And the explanation that he arrives at seems pretty credible. And also bittersweet.

Good book.