Disappointment River

In 1789, Alexander Mackenzie travelled the 1,125 miles of the immense river in Canada that now bears his name, in search of the fabled Northwest Passage. In 2016, the acclaimed memoirist Brian Castner retraced Mackenzie's route by canoe in a grueling journey—in search of Mackenzie's Passage 200 years later. Disappointment River is a dual historical narrative and travel memoir that at once transports readers back to the heroic age of North American exploration and places them in a still rugged but increasingly fragile Arctic wilderness in the process of profound alteration by the dual forces of energy extraction and climate change. Fourteen years before Lewis and Clark, Mackenzie set off to cross the continent of North America with a team of voyageurs and Chipewyan guides. In this book, Brian Castner not only retells the story of Mackenzie's epic voyages in vivid prose, he personally retraces his travels in an 1,125-mile canoe voyage down the river that bears his name, battling exhaustion, exposure, mosquitoes, white water rapids and the threat of bears. He transports readers to a world rarely glimpsed in the media, of tar sands, thawing permafrost, remote indigenous villages and, at the end, a wide open Arctic Ocean that has the potential of becoming a far-northern Mississippi of barges and pipelines and oil money.

In the tradition of Michael Herr’s Dispatches and works by such masters of the memoir as Mary Karr and Tobias Wolff, a powerful account of war and homecoming. Brian Castner served three tours of duty in the Middle East, two of them as the commander of an Explosive Ordnance Disposal unit in Iraq. Days and nights he and his team—his brothers—would venture forth in heavily armed convoys from their Forward Operating Base to engage in the nerve-racking yet strangely exhilarating work of either disarming the deadly improvised explosive devices that had been discovered, or picking up the pieces when the alert came too late. They relied on an army of remote-controlled cameras and robots, but if that technology failed, a technician would have to don the eighty-pound Kevlar suit, take the Long Walk up to the bomb, and disarm it by hand. This lethal game of cat and mouse was, and continues to be, the real war within America’s wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. But The Long Walk is not just about battle itself. It is also an unflinching portrayal of the toll war exacts on the men and women who are fighting it. When Castner returned home to his wife and family, he began a struggle with a no less insidious foe, an unshakable feeling of fear and confusion and survivor’s guilt that he terms The Crazy. His thrilling, heartbreaking, stunningly honest book immerses the reader in two harrowing and simultaneous realities: the terror and excitement and camaraderie of combat, and the lonely battle against the enemy within—the haunting memories that will not fade, the survival instincts that will not switch off. After enduring what he has endured, can there ever again be such a thing as “normal”? The Long Walk will hook you from the very first sentence, and it will stay with you long after its final gripping page has been turned.

The ocean is one of the few untamed places on earth—unpredictable and unsympathetic to the lives lost there. For this reason, people remain fascinated by its tides, currents, and mysteries. Life and Death at Cape Disappointment is Christopher J. D'Amelio's first-hand account of life as a surfman at one of the Coast Guard’s most dangerous stations. Cape Disappointment is one of the most notorious Coast Guard units on the Pacific Coast. Its area of responsibility is referred to as the “Graveyard of the Pacific.” This book focuses on five of the most significant search and rescue cases during D'Amelio's tour and how such work affected him and his colleagues mentally and physically. It’s armchair entertainment for those enthralled by the ocean.

“Masterful.” Disappointment River is a historical narrative and travel memoir that at once transports readers back to the heroic age of North American exploration and places them in a still rugged but increasingly fragile Arctic wilderness in the process of profound change. Fourteen years before Lewis and Clark, Mackenzie set off to cross the continent of North America with a team of voyageurs and Chipewyan guides in an attempt to find a trade route to the riches of the East. What he found was a river that he named “Disappointment.” Mackenzie died thinking he had failed. He was wrong. In this book, Brian Castner not only retells the story of Mackenzie's epic voyages in vivid prose, he personally retraces his travels, battling exhaustion, exposure, mosquitoes, white-water rapids and the threat of bears. He transports readers to a world rarely glimpsed in the media, of tar sands, thawing permafrost, remote indigenous villages and, at the end, a wide-open Arctic Ocean that could become a far-northern Mississippi of barges and pipelines and oil money. What he reveals is a world that Alexander Mackenzie dreamed of but could never have fully imagined.

Lyrical field notes exploring tests of courage in relationships from a bold emerging voice in Canadian poetry.

“The Graces demands to be read twice: The first time for the suspense; the second for the subtleties you missed initially.” —The New York Times Book Review Everyone loves the Graces. Fenrin, Thalia, and Summer Grace are attractive, rich, and glamorous, and they’ve cast a spell over their high school—and their entire town. They’re also rumored to have powerful connections all over the world. If you’re not in love with one of them, you want to be one of them. This is especially true for River, the new girl at school. River’s different from the rest of the horde that both revere and fear the Grace family. She’s dark, aloof, and just maybe . . . magical. And she wants to be a Grace more than anything. But what the Graces don’t know is that River’s presence in their town is no accident. The first rule of witchcraft is that if you want something bad enough, you can get it . . . no matter who has to pay. “A teenage girl becomes obsessed with a family of reputed witches . . . vivid . . . powerful.” —Kirkus Reviews (starred review) “Eve conjures up an intriguing vision of small-town mystique, with the Grace family depicted as unknowable and otherworldly—the mystery of whether magic is at play hangs over much of the story—and self-involved, obsessive River’s less-than-trustworthy narration adds to the air of uncertainty.” —Publishers Weekly

A gripping and wholly original account of the epic human tragedy that was the great Klondike Gold Rush of 1897-98. One hundred thousand men and women rushed heedlessly north to make their fortunes; very few did, but many thousands of them (and their pack animals) died in the attempt. The electrifying announcement in 1897 that gold was to be found in wildly enriching quantities in the Klondike River region in remote Alaska was demonically well-timed to attract an exodus of economically desperate Americans. Within weeks, tens of thousands of them were embarking from western ports to throw themselves at some of the harshest terrain on the planet--in winter, yet--woefully unprepared, with no experience at all in mining or mountaineering. It was a mass delusion that quickly proved deadly. Brian Castner tells the unvarnished yet always striking and often amazing truth of this greed-fuelled migration.

The third novel in the award-winning author's classic Galactic Center series is available once again. "A challenging, pacesetting work of hard science fiction that should not be missed" (Los Angeles Times). Nearly 100,000 years after first contact with the machines that dominate the universe, a few hundred humans survive. Trapped on Snowglade, a barren world near the center of the galaxy, people like Killeen of Family Bishop and his child Toby are primitive scavengers, homeless and hunted by the ruling "mechs." Then suddenly, a strange cosmic entity-neither organic nor cybernetic nor living matter-reaches out from a black hole to speak with Killeen. But can this fallen descendant of starfarers understand this alien being in time-and seize his only chance to save his family and mankind from final annihilation?