Disappointment River

Brian Castner's canoe trip along the 1,100-mile Mackenzie River in the Canadian Northwest Territories sounds daunting to the point of completely terrifying. His deep voice and matter-of-fact tone combine with a keen sense of timing, a glint of amusement, and a dash of fear to evoke hardship, awe, isolation, and clouds of buggy misery. Castner, along with a relay of four friends, re-creates Alexander Mackenzie's attempt to discover the Northwest Passage in 1789. Both expeditions are described in alternating chapters. Some things are just the same--wind, whitecaps, mosquitoes. Others are completely different--it took years for the original fur trappers to receive payment, and now there is intermittent cell phone reception. Of course, the most significant difference is that Castner succeeds in finding melting polar seas where Mackenzie was stymied by impenetrable ice. A.B. � AudioFile 2018, Portland, Maine