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Off the Page Author Series

Brian Castner Author Visit

The nonfiction writer, former Explosive Ordnance Disposal officer and veteran of the Iraq War visits Firestone Park Branch Library to talk about his new book Disappointment River.

Author Brian Castner received a Bronze Star for his service in the Iraq War. In addition to Disappointment River, he is the author of The Long Walk (2012) and All the Ways We Kill and Die (2016), and the co-editor of the anthology The Road Ahead (2017). His journalism and essays have appeared in Esquire, Wired, Vice, the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Atlantic, and other publications.

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.

The book retraces the journey of Alexander Mackenzie, who set off fourteen years before Lewis and Clark 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.

Castner transports readers to a world rarely glimpsed in the media, of tar sands, thawing permafrost, remote indigenous villages and, in the end, the 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.

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