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...Redmond O'Hanlon's classic Into the Heart of Borneo.) You never quite get a fix on what Fawcett means to Grann, and you find yourself wishing, uncharitably, that he would narrowly escape death a little more often. What keeps you going is the backstory. The theory that the Amazon basin conceals the capital of an advanced civilization has a long history--it's one of those ideas that's just too romantic to die. As early as the 16th century, the conquistadores were pouring men into the emerald hell to find it. They called the city El Dorado...
Percy Harrison Fawcett was the quintessential dashing late-Victorian explorer. Almost too late--he was born in 1867, when the world was starting to run low on terra incognita. Tall, steely and virtually indestructible, he spent much of his life mapping the Amazon basin. In 1925 he set out to find a legendary city he called Z, a glittering oasis of civilization supposedly sequestered deep in the jungle. Whereupon the jungle, having nibbled at him for decades, ate him alive...
...theory had been largely discredited, but he figured that if he hacked through the jungle instead of following rivers, he would find what others had missed. At stake was not just a material fortune but an intellectual victory. Conventional wisdom said that despite all its lush abundance, the Amazon region could never support an evolved, sophisticated human society--it was, in the phrase of one archaeologist, a "counterfeit paradise." Fawcett believed otherwise...
...Nisenholtz says the Times is the top-selling periodical on at the Kindle Store, though a non-disclosure agreement with Amazon prevents him from quantifying that statement. "We continue to see an explosion of form factors," he added. "But I don't see anything right now that is bursting through like the iPhone did or the Kindle can potentially do going forward." (The Times' iPhone app has been downloaded more than a million times, he said.) (See the top 10 iPhone applications...
...race to build a better e-reader is just getting started, of course, and Amazon's success is far from assured. Mountain View, California-based Plastic Logic, whose reading device is still a year away from launch, was set to announce a number of partner agreements today, including USA Today and the Financial Times. Though still in prototype, that e-reader is thinner than Kindle2, features a touchscreen the dimensions of a sheet of paper and can render virtually any typeface...