The Lost City of Z

I've never been able to keep up New Year's Resolutions, and for all intents and purposes have stopped trying.  This year, however, our library is celebrating it's 50th anniversary by holding a contest: Read 50 books, and at the end of the year get your name entered into a contest. Books read to children count too. Enter the Family 50: This year each family member will either read or be read 50 books.

In a perfect world, I'd have the children write or recite a synopsis of each book they read and post it. And truly, we might get this done. But for my part I hope to write a review of each of my books, both as a way to try and consistently write and as a way to record the books I've read. Let's see if this lasts a month!

My first book is The Lost City of Z by David Grann. At this point I will only say that any review any person can write about this book will not do it justice, so stop reading this and GET THE BOOK! I myself had avoided reading it for well over a year, thinking that it was simply another adventure book.  Not that there's anything wrong with a good adventure story. They can be exciting and interesting. They can help let us feel better about ourselves by painting a picture of an explorer who invariably made a series of bad decisions we ourselves have not made. Short of traveling to a place oneself, there is no better way to learn geography than to read about others who have gotten to know a place firsthand. Truly, adventure books are great!

But this is not merely a description of one man's remarkable travels to one of the most interesting and least explored places at the turn of the 20th century, though Grann's description of the Amazon as experienced by Percy Fawcett is truly amazing (sidenote: tropical diseases are horrific!). It's a book about history, literature, anthropology, geography and technology since the discovery of the New World. Examples of questions that you will find answered: Did Arthur Conan Doyle entertain notions of the occult, and why? Where did we get all the rubber for tires when cars became more prevalent? Why would an opera company be made to perform in the Amazon, and how did they fare? Why were there so darn many explorers in the Victorian age? What do you do if you get maggots in your arm? This book has these answers and many, many more...

As you can tell, I loved this book. I recommend it to anyone with a vague interest in the greater world around them. It would be a lovely spine to a course about South America, with two weeks to read and discuss the book and the rest of the semester devoted entirely to independent projects that piqued the interest of instructors or students. Were I to pick one book that could serve as a jumping off point to learn about Conquistadores, the Amazon, the history of WWI, early anthropology, exploration, the Royal Geographical Society of London, the English, or Colonialism, this would be it. I can't believe how much the author packed into one book.