Why am I passionate about this?
My interest in exploration and cross-cultural encounters is rooted in the experience of travel itself, which rests on the disorienting appeal of unfamiliar places and peoples. Exploration was also conducted for more practical reasons; sponsoring agencies sought to open up new markets, access new resources, and gain other material benefits. What interests me about the subject, then, is both its experiential and its instrumental dimensions. What doesn’t interest me is the myth of the explorer as a romantic hero, which was invented mainly to distract from these grubbier aspects of exploration.
Dane's book list on exploration and cross-cultural encounters
Why did Dane love this book?
It’s fair to say that explorers are pretty obsessive people, and no one does a better job portraying their obsessions than David Grann in this book about the British explorer Percy Fawcett. Fawcett made a series of expeditions into the Amazonian jungle in search of a fabled lost city.
His quest ended with his disappearance and presumed death, a mystery as intriguing as the one surrounding the city of Z itself. The title alone pulled me in, and once I started reading the book, I found it hard to stop.
5 authors picked The Lost City of Z as one of their favorite books, and they share why you should read it.
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'A riveting, exciting and thoroughly compelling tale of adventure'JOHN GRISHAM
The story of Colonel Percy Harrison Fawcett, the inspiration behind Conan Doyle's The Lost World
Fawcett was among the last of a legendary breed of British explorers. For years he explored the Amazon and came to believe that its jungle concealed a large, complex civilization, like El Dorado. Obsessed with its discovery, he christened it the City of Z. In 1925, Fawcett headed into the wilderness with his son Jack, vowing to make history. They vanished without a…