The Endless Allure of El Dorado

The Lost City of Z
By David Grann
(Doubleday, 339 pages, $27.50)



Percy Harrison Fawcett, the affection-starved son of an independently wealthy Devon cricketer, joined the British army, got "slightly gassed" during World War I, surveyed Bolivia, went quietly mad, devoted his middle years to searching for the Lost Cities of the Brazilian rainforest and, while doing so in 1925, vanished.

... his fate remains unknown, and his Lost City – of which Arthur Conan Doyle made much, with the Professor Challenger of his novels based largely on Fawcett – remains unfound.

Now in the hands of David Grann, an amusingly self-deprecating Brooklyn nerd on the staff of the New Yorker, it is brought vividly alive once more in "The Lost City of Z." So good is his recounting of the yarn that no less a luminary than Brad Pitt is said to be interested in a film version.

Review by Simon Winchester, the author of "The Map That Changed the World," "Krakatoa" and, most recently, "The Man Who Loved China."