Baron Roman Nikolai Maximilian von Ungern-Sternberg and Colonel Percy Harrison Fawcett were men of the odd fringes of softening empires; each would, in his own way, champion a fantasized primitivism as the antidote to a civilization in decay. David Grann’s The Lost City of Z describes Fawcett’s obsession with the fabled Amazonian city, a spiritual El Dorado and “the cradle of all civilizations.” In 1925, Fawcett set out, on foot and with only his son and a sidekick, into the jungle in search of Z. At the time, he was probably the most famous anthropologist-explorer since Livingstone; he did not return, and his disappearance inspired decades of fruitless inquest. James Palmer’s The Bloody White Baron chronicles the murderous reign of Ungern, whose loyalty to Russia’s deposed Czar Nicholas II found expression in
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