Mini-review: The Lost City of Z

Riveting account of Colonel Percy Fawcett’s last expedition to find El Dorado (or "Z" as he called it), how the circumstances of his life led him to it and the various attempts to find out what happened to him.

 Fawcett, perhaps more than anyone, can claim to be a real Indiana Jones. Not just because he was an explorer interested in finding ancient treasure - but also because he seems have been able to pull off extraordinary and inhuman feats of endurance and survival including near starvation,  avoiding fevers that crippled similar explorers and maintaining an incredible pace of exploration and mapping.

 Unsurprisingly, his adventures were the inspiration for The Lost World by Arthur Conan Doyle.

 Loved the (ultimately untrue) idea of the amazon rainforest as a counterfeit paradise i.e. while giving the appearance of abundance, it is actually rather barren in terms of providing food and shelter due to the canopy and poor soils preventing undergrowth and so removing many opportunities for fauna to thrive.