During a summer in college, I travelled around South America, and spent a good deal of time backpacking and exporing northwestern Bolivia, following overgrown Inca Trails and taking boats up into the deep jungle and mining country.I had heard about Fawcett's adventures during my travels, and I was delighted to find out that the book surpassed my expectations when I finally got the chance to read it.
Fawcett worked for the British government (the Royal Geographic Society, I believe), and was sent to the Brazillian-Bolivian frontier in the early 20th century to server as an impartial third party in a border dispute.
The book, written by his son who went on to become a railroad expert in Peru, is a chronicle of that trip and his later adventures into the South American wilderness in search of a lost city he believed to exist.
Fawcett kept great journals, and his descriptions of the time are fascinating. Having travelled in this area, I can say that Fawcett's descriptions are dead on, and for anyone looking for a true frontier adventure in the early 21st century, not a whole lot has changed in the past 100 years.
'Brazillian Adventure' by Peter Fleming (the brother of James Bond author Ian Fleming) is the semi-comic story of a British journalist who went on a search for Fawcett several decades after the former disappeared in the early 1920's (the date might be slightly off).
It's great to see that this book has finally been put back in print. A true gem.
