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Book Review of The Lost City of Z: A Tale of Deadly Obsession in the Amazon

The Lost City of Z: A Tale of Deadly Obsession in the Amazon
leecat2 avatar reviewed on + 44 more book reviews


I give this a four because, the author's own journey is collapsed into such a small fragment of the book. He is, though, the least interesting part of the book, so perhaps, it is a good thing.
I was carried away with the stories of Amazonian exploration. It is easy to feel impassioned from the luxury of one's armchair, but traveling there has never seemed tempting. The realities of the area are vast humidity (most friends who visited that area could not keep the mold off of their clothing), heat, starvation for newcomers, etc.
After all of the racism, cruelty, slavery, greed that marked early explorations, it is a relief to find that archaeologists are now finding the lost civilizations and their locations.
A tale not for the faint-hearted. I had to fast-forward through much of the cruelty revealed.