Exploration & Expeditions

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The Lost City of Z

A Tale of Deadly Obsession in the Amazon

By David Grann

In 1925, British explorer Percy Harrison Fawcett entered Brazil’s Mato Grosso with his son Jack and Jack’s friend Raleigh Rimell. They were searching for evidence of an ancient Amazonian society that Fawcett called “Z.” None returned. David Grann reconstructs the expedition, the career that led Fawcett toward it, and the succession of investigators and adventurers who tried to solve the disappearance. He also follows Fawcett’s trail himself, turning the investigation into a meeting point between biography, travel reporting, historical mystery, and archaeology. The result is not merely a survival story. It examines how imperial assumptions shaped exploration, why outsiders long underestimated Indigenous Amazonian societies, and how a powerful idea can consume both its originator and later seekers. Grann preserves the uncertainty surrounding Fawcett’s fate while showing that his broad conviction—that the Amazon once supported complex, settled communities—deserved more serious considerat…

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Arabian Sands

By Wilfred Thesiger

Arabian Sands is Wilfred Thesiger’s account of his journeys through southern Arabia between 1945 and 1950, including two camel crossings of the Rubʿ al Khali, or Empty Quarter. Although the crossings supply the book’s physical drama, its deeper subject is the life Thesiger shared with his Bedouin companions: dependence on wells and camels, endurance of hunger and thirst, tribal obligations, hospitality, loyalty, raiding, and the constant judgment required for survival. Written after oil development and motor transport had begun transforming the region, the narrative also serves as an elegy for a social world Thesiger believed was disappearing. The book combines expedition narrative, portraiture, landscape description, and cultural observation. Its lasting interest lies in the tension between its unusually close record of mid-twentieth-century desert life and the unmistakably personal—and sometimes romanticizing—perspective through which that life is presented.