Reading Across Rhode Island and The Lost City of Z

The Lost City of Z by David Grann

It is hard to imagine a time when explorers – people who went on long, dangerous journeys to as yet undiscovered places, were really famous, looked on as celebrities and whose exploits were reported in all the news media of the day.

“No Olympic games contender was ever trained down to a finer edge than these three reserved, matter-of-fact Englishmen, whose pathway to a forgotten world is beset by arrows, pestilence and wild beasts.”
[Los Angeles Times, 1925]

That’s the kind of notoriety that Percy Harrison Fawcett, explorer extraordinary, and other adventurers of the early 1900’s received. These were the days of T. E. Lawrence, Teddy Roosevelt, Shackleton, etc. Exploration was also of vital concern because there were really still places to explore - places that no one had ever gone before – where no one had mapped accurately.

The main story is of Fawcett, his mania for exploring the Amazon and his last expedition in search of the lost city of Z, aka El Dorado. Collected around the tale of Fawcett’s 1924 doomed expedition is the story of David Grann, a writer for the New Yorker magazine - a city-dweller who had never even gone camping before - and his attempt to follow in Fawcett’s footsteps, find the bones (literally) of the explorer – and maybe even the lost city itself.

This is not a tale for the faint-hearted. The living creatures, both big and small, that populate the Amazon jungle (or at least did in the 1920s) are directly out of your worst science fiction nightmare. That anyone would freely choose to enter into this arena of crawling beasts, starvation, disease and dangerous populations is beyond me. But it is still fascinating to read about what these men (and there were many Amazon expeditions, several to find Fawcett) attempted.

I will not reveal whether Grann actually found Fawcett or the lost city. Pick the book up and become an explorer yourself! Meg

Reading Across Rhode Island and Life As We Knew It

These days much of my reading is focused on the long list of possible titles for Reading Across Rhode Island 2010 – the Rhode Island Center for the Book’s state-wide community read program.

So far I have read (or listened to): Life As We Knew It by Susan Beth Pfeffer and The Autobiography of God by Julius Lester. I am in the middle of reading The Lost City of Z by David Grann and The Radioactive Boy Scout by Ken Silverstein. I plan to report on most of these titles as I finish reading.

Life As We Knew It is basically a book for young adults, but an interesting read nonetheless. Miranda and her family (Mom and two brothers, Matt and Johnny), are caught in a futuristic dilemma: an asteroid has crashed into earth’s moon and actually knocked it off its trajectory. This altered course causes multiple tsunamis, earthquakes, volcanoes and all the attendant weather problems. Food lines dry up; water runs out; the climate changes drastically; modern communications are a thing of the past. (Reading this book shortly after a large, mystery object actually crashed into Jupiter was a bit disconcerting. I called the book futuristic, but sometimes the future can be too close to reality for comfort.)

Miranda’s family is forced into survival mode and seeing how they cope (and sometimes fail to cope) was remarkable enough to keep me reading. At first getting ready for the what might happen seems like a gigantic wilderness adventure. Miranda does not see the need for half of the precautions her mother insists upon. But it soon becomes apparent that it is only due to her mom’s foresight that the family is able to survive.

Sacrifice, strict planning and rationing, hard work and most important the love, concern and respect that the family has for each other are also what keeps them alive and almost flourishing. One of the themes of the book is the value of living every day to the fullest, and that is certainly a philosophy everyone, young adult, adult, senior – can take to heart. Meg