Join us on Thursday, March 30th, at the Ukrainian-American Civic Center for a presentation about this adventure across North America! Doors and cash bar open at 5pm, and the program begins at 6pm. Admission is $10 or $5 for BMC Members. All proceeds go to Buffalo Maritime Center and our educational programs!
Bestselling Author Brian Castner will discuss his book Disappointment River. Fourteen years before Lewis and Clark, Alexander Mackenzie set out across North America by canoe 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.
The author retells the story of Mackenzie’s voyages and personally retraces his travels. 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.
Castner is a nonfiction writer, former Explosive Ordnance Disposal officer, and veteran of the Iraq War. His journalism and essays have appeared in the New York Times, WIRED, Esquire, The Atlantic, Foreign Policy, and on National Public Radio.
