bookshelf

DISAPPOINTMENT RIVER

Name: DISAPPOINTMENT RIVER
Author: Brian Castner
ISBN: 978-0-385-54162-6

FINDING AND LOSING THE NORTHWEST PASSAGE

by Brian Castner ‧ RELEASE DATE: March 13, 2018

A vital addition to the library of the far north and of exploration.

bookshelf

“Fierce winter never relented”: searching for a little-known explorer who left his name on many places, themselves little known, in the Canadian Arctic.

It’s not enough for Castner (All the Ways We Kill and Die, 2016, etc.) to have survived roadside bombs in Iraq, an experience he recounted in The Long Walk (2012). Now he sets off in search of Arctic explorer Alexander Mackenzie (1764-1820) and the river named for him, the second longest in North America, which traverses a country of few humans and plenty of bears. As the author writes appreciatively at the opening, the Mackenzie River is “so wide that the far bank appeared to be little more than a slight film of green,” while the island that stands at the river’s egress into the Arctic Ocean “is larger than five Manhattans.” He adds, “everything about [it] is enormous.” So it is, with an appropriately big story to match. Castner handles its several components skillfully, covering all the bases: for one, he provides a lively biography of Mackenzie, the youngest principal in the Northwest Company, contending not just with the rigors of exploration, but also with early corporate politics. For another, he covers the territory, traveling in what he conjectures to be Mackenzie’s footsteps and paddle traces in search of the fabled, elusive Northwest Passage, a pathway now easier to chart given thawing permafrost and melting ice caps. Every American knows the story of Lewis and Clark, Castner writes, surely too charitably; why, then, would we not know of Mackenzie and his legendary explorations? “And if I could trace the Missouri and Colorado rivers,” he writes, “if I knew how the Hudson and Lake Champlain got their names, how could I not do the same for this river, greater than them all?” In the end, that challenge is rhetorical, for Castner pays for that knowledge with no end of sweat, toil, and even some blood and tears.

A vital addition to the library of the far north and of exploration.

Pub Date: March 13, 2018

ISBN: 978-0-385-54162-6

Page Count: 400

Publisher: Doubleday

Review Posted Online: Jan. 10, 2018

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2018

Categories:

BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | HISTORY | UNITED STATES | GENERAL HISTORY | GENERAL BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR

- BOOK REVIEW
STAMPEDE
by Brian Castner

- BOOK REVIEW
THE ROAD AHEAD
edited by Adrian Bonenberger & Brian Castner

- BOOK REVIEW
ALL THE WAYS WE KILL AND DIE
by Brian Castner

bookshelf

THE PURSUIT OF HAPPYNESS

FROM MEAN STREETS TO WALL STREET

by Chris Gardner with Quincy Troupe ‧ RELEASE DATE: June 1, 2006

Well-told and admonitory.

bookshelf

Young-rags-to-mature-riches memoir by broker and motivational speaker Gardner.

Born and raised in the Milwaukee ghetto, the author pulled himself up from considerable disadvantage. He was fatherless, and his adored mother wasn’t always around; once, as a child, he spied her at a family funeral accompanied by a prison guard. When beautiful, evanescent Moms was there, Chris also had to deal with Freddie “I ain’t your goddamn daddy!” Triplett, one of the meanest stepfathers in recent literature. Chris did “the dozens” with the homies, boosted a bit and in the course of youthful adventure was raped. His heroes were Miles Davis, James Brown and Muhammad Ali. Meanwhile, at the behest of Moms, he developed a fondness for reading. He joined the Navy and became a medic (preparing badass Marines for proctology), and a proficient lab technician. Moving up in San Francisco, married and then divorced, he sold medical supplies. He was recruited as a trainee at Dean Witter just around the time he became a homeless single father. All his belongings in a shopping cart, Gardner sometimes slept with his young son at the office (apparently undiscovered by the night cleaning crew). The two also frequently bedded down in a public restroom. After Gardner’s talents were finally appreciated by the firm of Bear Stearns, his American Dream became real. He got the cool duds, hot car and fine ladies so coveted from afar back in the day. He even had a meeting with Nelson Mandela. Through it all, he remained a prideful parent. His own no-daddy blues are gone now.

Well-told and admonitory.

Pub Date: June 1, 2006

ISBN: 0-06-074486-3

Page Count: 320

Publisher: Amistad/HarperCollins

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2006

Categories:

GENERAL BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | BUSINESS

bookshelf

INTO THE WILD

by Jon Krakauer ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 1, 1996

A wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor...

bookshelf

The excruciating story of a young man on a quest for knowledge and experience, a search that eventually cooked his goose, told with the flair of a seasoned investigative reporter by Outside magazine contributing editor Krakauer (Eiger Dreams, 1990).

Chris McCandless loved the road, the unadorned life, the Tolstoyan call to asceticism. After graduating college, he took off on another of his long destinationless journeys, this time cutting all contact with his family and changing his name to Alex Supertramp. He was a gent of strong opinions, and he shared them with those he met: "You must lose your inclination for monotonous security and adopt a helter-skelter style of life''; "be nomadic.'' Ultimately, in 1992, his terms got him into mortal trouble when he ran up against something—the Alaskan wild—that didn't give a hoot about Supertramp's worldview; his decomposed corpse was found 16 weeks after he entered the bush. Many people felt McCandless was just a hubris-laden jerk with a death wish (he had discarded his map before going into the wild and brought no food but a bag of rice). Krakauer thought not. Admitting an interest that bordered on obsession, he dug deep into McCandless's life. He found a willful, reckless, moody boyhood; an ugly little secret that sundered the relationship between father and son; a moral absolutism that agitated the young man's soul and drove him to extremes; but he was no more a nutcase than other pilgrims. Writing in supple, electric prose, Krakauer tries to make sense of McCandless (while scrupulously avoiding off-the-rack psychoanalysis): his risky behavior and the rites associated with it, his asceticism, his love of wide open spaces, the flights of his soul.

A wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor will it to readers of Krakauer's narrative. (4 maps) (First printing of 35,000; author tour)