Wednesday, September 21, 2011

Book Review: The Lost City of Z

** (2 stars out of 5)

I'm in a book club full of delightful nerds that meets at a reasonably priced local eatery each month, and this one was no exception. We read and discussed David Grann's 'The Lost City of Z'.

Non-fiction is not my usual read, and I wouldn't ever have explored this one on my own, but it's well-researched so I can't give it one star, even though I dearly want to. For me, it is a tenuous "O.K.".

LCoZ relates the tale of Col. Percy Fawcett, an ultra-manly jerk-off who vanished in the Amazon in the nineteen-twenties. He took his kid and about a hundred other people who went looking for them over the years with him to their horrible graves. Nice job, ass! Also, it's about the lost city he didn't find.

Spoilers: it's a mystery story that
remains a mystery, and I really dislike that sort of thing. The only answers I got were: DON'T abandon your wife to hack your way through deadly bug-infested nothingness, DON'T enslave or genocide the locals, and El Dorado probably existed... but it was probably biodegradable.

I want to call this The Lost City of ZZZs- I fell asleep about a dozen times while reading it.

Since you are not me: why not? You're only going to lose your time, not your skin, sanity, or safety on a pointless quest for fortune and glory. If you're that interested, just watch Indiana Jones again... maybe the one with the aliens and nuclear explosion fridge and that Transformers kid.

No comments: