Author's Argument : The Lost City of Z by David Grann Section 2

Précis

In David Grann’s book The Lost City of Z (2010) chapters 10-17, he continues to describe Fawcett’s journey as an explorer but he focuses on Fawcett’s reasoning for locating the lost city. Grann first depicts Fawcett as an explorer obsessed with the thrill of adventure despite his longing to be ordinary with an narrative about his adventures; he then compares Fawcett’s research of the lost city to his own with an anecdote and a description of Fawcett's research; the author also uses anecdotes to describe how much the lost city of Z consumed Fawcett’s life even in the midst of a war. His purpose is to illustrate the extent in which Fawcett’s obsession controls his actions. He seems to have a broad audience in mind because his informative tone suggests that anyone who enjoys a suspense-filled adventure would take pleasure in his book

Vocabulary

• Edict – a formal or authoritative command
• Robust – requiring great physical strength
• Incited – encourage violent behavior
• Gesticulated – to use dramatic gestures rather than speak
• Incensed – to make very angry
• Precarious – dependent on chance; uncertain
• Incessantly – endlessly
• Pernicious – having harmful effect
• Malice – intention to do evil
• Guile – sly or cunning intelligence
• Contemptuous – scornful
• Imperviousness – no penetrable
• Parlance – particular way of speaking
• Indignant – feeling angry due to unfair treatment

Tone

 Informative, Objective

Rhetorical Strategies

Syntax

(Use of hyphens for clarification and insert commentary)

“Brian was different from his older brother—indeed, different from most Fawcett men.”(193)

Repetition

“…he noticed something sticking out of the ground. He started to scour the soil. Virtually everywhere he scratched, he later informed the RGS, he turned up bits of ancient, brittle pottery. He thought the craftsmanship…” (162)

Telegraphic Sentences

“Something was amiss.” (159)

Imagery

“ I was escorted upstairs into the manuscript division, a chamber lined with books that climbed several stories toward a stained-glass ceiling, where a faint light seeped through, revealing, amid the room’s grandeur, a hint of disrepair-dilapidated wooden desks and dusty light bulbs.” (178-179)

Allusion

“Apparently, it was the Holy Grail for the Fawcett freaks.”(179)

Questions

• Why did Fawcett suddenly feel like Holt as a spy for Dr .Rice towards the end of chapter 17?
• Why did Grann decide to insert thirty-two images in-between pages 116 and 117?
• To what extent does obsession control one’s life, i.e. is there any limitations to what one will endure to satisfy one’s obsession?

Quotation

“Yet Fawcett could never find his way out of what the historian Dane Kennedy has called the “mental maze of race.”(158)