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

David Grann's The Lost City of Z investigates the fate of Colonel Percy Fawcett who went missing during a 1925 trip in search of a great lost city (which he called Z) deep in the Amazon. Grann combines extensive historical research with his own attempts to find Z, along with interesting asides comparing for example the Amazon’s abundance of life forms with its lack of conduciveness to human survival. (Here is Grann's original New Yorker article, which was the basis for the book.)