THE LOST CITY OF Z, 2009's terrific book looks like it's 2017's terrific film

THE LOST CITY OF Z: A Tale of Deadly Obsession in the Amazon
David Grann
Doubleday
$27.50 hardcover, available now

Rating: 4.5* of five

The Publisher Says: A grand mystery reaching back centuries. A sensational disappearance that made headlines around the world. A quest for truth that leads to death, madness or disappearance for those who seek to solve it. The Lost City of Z is a blockbuster adventure narrative about what lies beneath the impenetrable jungle canopy of the Amazon.

After stumbling upon a hidden trove of diaries, New Yorker writer David Grann set out to solve "the greatest exploration mystery of the 20th century": What happened to the British explorer Percy Fawcett & his quest for the Lost City of Z?

In 1925 Fawcett ventured into the Amazon to find an ancient civilization, hoping to make one of the most important discoveries in history. For centuries Europeans believed the world's largest jungle concealed the glittering kingdom of El Dorado. Thousands had died looking for it, leaving many scientists convinced that the Amazon was truly inimical to humans. But Fawcett, whose daring expeditions inspired Conan Doyle's The Lost World, had spent years building his scientific case. Captivating the imagination of millions round the globe, Fawcett embarked with his 21-year-old son, determined to prove that this ancient civilisation--which he dubbed Z--existed. Then his expedition vanished. Fawcett's fate, & the tantalizing clues he left behind about Z, became an obsession for hundreds who followed him into the uncharted wilderness. For decades scientists & adventurers have searched for evidence of Fawcett's party & the lost City of Z. Countless have perished, been captured by tribes or gone mad. As Grann delved ever deeper into the mystery surrounding Fawcett's quest, & the greater mystery of what lies within the Amazon, he found himself, like the generations who preceded him, being irresistibly drawn into the jungle's green hell. His quest for the truth & discoveries about Fawcett's fate & Z form the heart of this complexly enthralling narrative.

2017 Movie News: Go watch the trailer for this Amazon Studios film. I'll wait. Okay, now go read the Rotten Tomatoes aggregation. Won't take long.

Now. A four-plus star book review from me and a host of other sources, agreement among critics from Den of Geek all the way to The Nation, and a cast of pretty, pretty actors...plus the fact that it's an Amazon Studios original appearing hot on the heels of their Golden Globe-winning Manchester by the Sea, makes this a super-promising April 2017 must-see. Amazon might very well be Satan, I can't say I agree but there's a chorus of unhappy people from contractors to suppliers to anti-globalization zealots who say it is, but Satan's offering us a lot of really great inducements to forget his agenda. Amazon's Prime streaming service alone is worth the $100 a year it costs. I love that so much of Amazon Studios' output is book-based. Calculated or not, it's a great thing to see the filmed entertainment industry gain a player that mines the immense vein of unadapted written work instead of churning out sequels and comic book heroes and the occasional bland screensaver-level movie.

My Review: This excellent book is the exciting, unusual story of the last of the Victorian polymath explorers on his quest to prove the unthinkable: That the Amazon, that "false paradise", supported a major technologically advanced civilization before the Columbian Holocaust.

Percy Fawcett took his oldest son and his oldest son's best friend into the depths of Amazonia in 1925, to search for a place that the consensus of scientific wisdom of the time said could not exist. From that day to this, there has been no evidence of these three mens' existence. This by itself would provide the bones of a fascinating story. Why would a father risk his son's life in so unlikely a quest? Why bring the son's best friend? What the ruddy bleeding hell was a 58-year-old man THINKING to do this at all?!?

Percy Fawcett was supported by his wife, who was his son's mother, and the mother of the best friend, as well as the Royal Geographical Society. He was a veteran Amazonian explorer. His son was himself writ young. His son's friend, well, it's on such trips as this that a man uncovers his true self, and the best friend was...wanting.

The story of Percy's life, as Grann tells it, is interesting; the story of the exploration of the Amazon is interesting; the story of the many, many attempts to find the three disappeared explorers is not as interesting, but is very deftly compacted into a few passages.

The author's expedition to follow Percy Fawcett's footsteps is, blessedly, brief in the telling. Exactly long enough, in fact. What the author, a fat middle-aged shlub who writes for The New Yorker, discovers...should be front-page news.

Read this book. No evasive "maybes" no "I'll get around to it"s just go GET THIS BOOK AND READ IT. No one with an ounce of human curiosity can possibly regret reading The Lost City of Z.

ROOSEVELT'S BEAST, damn near perfect father-and-son novel

ROOSEVELT'S BEAST
LOUIS BAYARD
St. Martin's Griffin
$22.99 trade paper, available now

Rating: 4.5* of five

The Publisher Says: 1914. Brazil’s Rio da Dúvida, the River of Doubt. Plagued by hunger and suffering the lingering effects of malaria, Theodore Roosevelt, his son Kermit, and the other members of the now-ravaged Roosevelt-Rondon scientific expedition are traveling deeper and deeper into the jungle. When Kermit and Teddy are kidnapped by a never-before-seen Amazonian tribe, the great hunters are asked one thing in exchange for their freedom: find and kill a beast that leaves no tracks and that no member of the tribe has ever seen. But what are the origins of this beast, and how do they escape its brutal wrath?

Roosevelt's Beast is a story of the impossible things that become possible when civilization is miles away, when the mind plays tricks on itself, and when old family secrets refuse to stay buried. With his characteristically rich storytelling and a touch of old-fashioned horror, the bestselling and critically acclaimed Louis Bayard turns the story of the well-known Roosevelt-Rondon expedition on its head and dares to ask: Are the beasts among us more frightening than the beasts within?

I RECEIVED THIS BOOK FROM THE PUBLISHER AS PART OF LIBRARY THING'S EARLY REVIEWERS PROGRAM

My Review: Listen to this:

After all these years, his best friend is malaria.
Even on the brink of an Alaska summer, it comes calling: a bone-deep chill one night, a ministry of sweat the next. Calling him back to old battles.

And we're off, down the River of Doubt with Kermit Roosevelt and his famous father (of whom Kermit's eldest half-sister, Alice, said, "Father wanted to be the bride at every wedding and the corpse at every funeral") and somebody scientific who, frankly, interested me not at all.

Kermit tells us about this factual trip in moderate detail, enough to make the facts of the journey come across as lived, not reported. That's a frequent issue I have with historical fiction, the author's telling of the tale sounds like a highly embellished report and not a novel. Enough is here to make the atmosphere come humidly to life; not so much as to feel ponderous. Here, like this, listen:

Here was the thing about traveling down an uncharted river: You could only say how long you'd been traveling; you could never say how long it would be.

It's the precise sort of thing I'd expect the clever son of an overwhelmingly larger-than-life father to say, to focus on distances and travels and quotidian concerns because his giant of a father (Roosevelt was maybe 5'8" in body but 12'12" in spirit) has sucked up the glory-hounding until he's simply got nothing else to think about.

And then on an overnight stop, Kermit and TR are kidnapped by a previously uncontacted native group (I do so loathe the locution "undiscovered tribe"—and who, might one inquire, determined that being contacted was being discovered, like their lives before Europeans showed up weren't real?). Their freedom can only be bought by ridding these people of their monster, a killer of Grendel-ish horrific-ness. Two days the men seek and revoltingly find the Beast's results, and only when they are living out a nightmare of misery and a cleansing, purifying agony of memory and rage do they really encounter the Beast...within, as always.

Both are shattered and neither is ever the same after this trip. (Factual again, after the invented Beast interlude.) Kermit succumbs slowly to the depression and addiction that killed his paternal uncle, and TR himself gives up, defeated for the only time in his life...and by himself, as in the end are we all. TR can't face the even the notion that anyone will ever so much as hear a whisper of his ordeal (oh, and Kermit's, but you know whose rep is foremost on TR's mind):

“You are asking us to lie, Colonel?"
"I am asking you to omit. Surely, amidst the...the infinite gradations of human venality, that particular sin ranks low." The old man kneaded the folds of his throat. "What happened out there belongs out there. The jungle has it; let the jungle keep it...”

A novel of fathers and sons, of myths and monsters, and of identity and fate. It's written in Bayard's accustomed voluptuous prose, and it's got the usual peaks and valley in plotting. I myownself wish that the Beast had been nailed down, shown to be either real or a projection of mass psychosis or a deeply experienced malaria dream. Nonetheless, I'm sure many will find this blurring of borders exactly to their taste, and even those among us for whom that's not the draw to the story needn't let it cause us too much pain. Simply decide for yourself what interpretation you want to put on it, and do so. Bayard's story will support it.

And that's about the best compliment I can give a writer, that one there.

Today's Review Posts for 16 April 2013

It's an all-science Tuesday. Five memorable science/environmental issues titles:

THE VIEW FROM LAZY POINT well, let's say it gets better from here

WICKED PLANTS I may never stop scratching!

THE BIG NECESSITY time we stopped squirming and started talking about sewerage issues

THE LOST CITY OF Z adventure, discovery, death!!

HOW TO BUILD AN ANDROID the chronicle of the loss of PKD's head. Even odder than it sounds

Stop by and see what takes your fancy!

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