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Edward Dolnick's Down the Great Unknown depicts the "last epic journey on American soil," John Wesley Powell's exploration of the Grand Canyon and the fulminating, carnivorous Colorado River. The book, a model of precision, clarity, and serene passion, outshines, arguably, its bestselling brother-volume, Stephen Ambrose's Undaunted Courage.
On May 24, 1869, Powell, an ambitious, autocratic, one-armed Civil War veteran and amateur scientist, and a casually recruited crew of nine--without a lick of white water experience--embarked from an obscure railroad stop in the Wyoming Territory to travel through a region "scarcely better known than Atlantis." Ninety-nine days, 1,000 miles and nearly 500 rapids later, six of the men came ashore in Arizona--the first humans to run the waters of the Grand Canyon. Dolnick tells this story of courage, naiveté, hardship, and petty squabbling simply and authoritatively using entries from the men's journals, deft overviews (we always know where we are), and short science, history, and psychology lessons, as well as the prodigious knowledge of present-day river runners and his own first-hand observations. His prose carries the day: Powell looks like a "stick of beef jerky adorned with whiskers," the boats are "walnut shells," which in rapids are little better than "ladybugs caught in a hose's blast" or "drunks trying to negotiate a revolving door," while the river is a "taunting bully," a "colossal mugger," a "sumo wrestler smothering a kitten," and a notable rock formation looks like what might happen if "Edward Gorey had designed the Bat Cave."
Down the Great Unknown brushes against perfection. This is history written as it should be--and too rarely is: enthusiastic, rigorous, painterly, gloriously free of both pedantry and hyperbole. --H. O'Billovitch
Book Description
0n May 24, 1869, a one-armed Civil War veteran named John Wesley Powell and a ragtag band of nine mountain men embarked on the last great quest in the American West. No one had ever explored the fabled Grand Canyon; to adventurers of that era it was a region almost as mysterious as Atlantis -- and as perilous.
The ten men set out down the mighty Colorado River in wooden rowboats. Six survived. Drawing on rarely examined diaries and journals, Down the Great Unknown is the first book to tell the full, true story.
Customer Reviews:
To Be The First Through The Then Unknown Colorado...........2007-08-27
I've "rafted" the upper Colorado.
Of course that was in a motorized raft, led by experienced pilots, with a map and they did all the cooking and if something really bad happened the ranger service could chopper in and get me (Hey, I *did* hike out from Phantom Ranch)
I can't conceive of doing it in an ungainly rowboat, without a steering oar, having little provisions, without a map or even knowledge of the river (what happens if you hit a 100 ft fall and nowhere to portage?), and where a broken ankle would have meant an almost certain death -- and with one arm.
Truthfully, its amazing this exposition survived.
Dolnick weaves in Powell's embellished account with the other expedition journals to craft a balanced account of the expedition, along with correlating the trip with known features of the canyon. Dolnick describes the tensions within the team -- categorizes their moves, good and bad and tracks their trailblazing passage.
Excellent read.
Too many digressions ..........2007-08-20
This is a pretty decent book for the newcomer who has never read anything about Powell. I found it less entertaining than my fellow reviewers though, as it follows the tedium of the daily journals a little too closely. I also found the narrative to be interspersed with too many digressions. These range from opinions of the Green/Colorado river by modern rafting experts to accounts of other early rafting expeditions, and a lengthy 2-chapter segment on the American Civil war and Battle of Shiloh. This latter exercise contributes nothing to the book, by the way! The reader is also left in the dark about the Native American peoples, Mormon settlers, and miners who inhabited this area at the same point in time ... Really, it is as if the expedition were done in a vacuum. Even worse was the lack of information on 9 of the 10 men who took part in the expedition. While there is more than enough about John Wesley Powell, readers get only sketchy details about the lives of the other 9 men. Even the simplest details like where these men were born is left out, nor are we given much about the kinds of lives they lived (careers, families, etc.) prior to the expedition (and precious little afterwards as well). Although 6 of these 9 men were, like Powell, fellow Union veterans of the Civil War, but we get nothing about their wartime experiences! We also have no clue what motivated them to join this expedition. This oversight would not doubt have suited the egotistical Powell, but is a serious oversight for a modern historian.
Excellent read.......2007-08-04
I enjoyed this book very much. So much that I have loaned it to family and friends to enjoy.
Down the Great Unknown.......2006-03-19
This book was informative but not a real "page turner". The author went off on tangents often that took away from the story at hand. It was not a bad book, but it was not full of the adventure that you would have expected the trip to have been.
I would much rather read this than John Wesley Powell's actual book........2005-09-29
"Down the Great Unknown" is a terrific retelling of John Wesley Powell's 1869 expedition down the Colorado River. The book's author brings to life all of the expedition's more minor (and usually overlooked) characters, and gives the reader a great sense of the danger of the river and the grandeur of the canyons.
The author has an excellent sense of history, and does a wonderful job of tying all his sources together. The book also includes a detailed look at how John Wesley Powell lost his arm, and an examination of all the possibilities of what could have happened to the three men who abandoned the expedition.
If I had any objections to this book, it would be that the author dismisses too quickly the real possibility that a man named James White may have gone down the Colorado through the Grand Canyon alone two years before Powell did. (I hope the author has since read "Hell or High Water," a well-researched book on that subject.)
Overall though, this is a great read, and is much better written and much more interesting than even Powell's account. I would recommend it to any fan of adventure writing, and to any fan of the West.
Book Description
The Chilton Total Car Care series continues to lead all other do-it-yourself automotive repair manuals. These manuals offer do-it-yourselfers of all levels TOTAL maintenance, service and repair information in an easy-to-use format. Each title covers all makes and models, unless otherwise indicated.
Customer Reviews:
Not Mercury Mountain V8 specific.......2007-03-22
Doesnt fully cover Mercury Mountaineer. Not a single picture of Mountaineer included. Both are slightly different.
Low quality printing of pictures, low quality paper.......2007-03-17
Low quality printing of pictures, low quality paper
Book Description
In May of 1869, eleven men embarked on a journey of exploration and discovery. 98 days later six of them arrived 1000 miles away after navigating the Green and Colorado Rivers to the end of Grand Canyon. The journals and writings of the expedition leader, John Wesley Powell have been extensively published but here, for the first time, are the newly transcribed, unabridged journals and letters of some of the other members of the group. Author Ghiglieri has used his extensive river running experience to introduce the whole group and their exploits of courage and endurance.
Customer Reviews:
Annoying crusade.......2007-02-13
Ghiglieri fails at the objective job of an historian. I wish he had laid out the river journals and related writings about the first Powell expedition without injecting such an extroardinary stream of personal invective. Ghiglieri doesn't trust the reader to draw his own conclusions about Powell's character. The author instead serves up an annoying personal crusade against Powell -- and against every prominent historical writer on the topic. I nearly abandoned the book while wading through the introductory tirade, but I was glad I stuck it out. Ghiglieri deserves credit for his work to research and compile the story of the first Powell expedition from the participants' river journals. Reading the expedition members' accounts grouped into daily entries is an extraordinary way to experience the epic trip as it unfolded. Unfortunately, this effort is bracketed by the author's ill-tempered rants. Much of the author's bile seems to be based on his years as a long-suffering commercial river boatman. I suspect I'd hike out of a river trip led by the author, like I nearly left his book.
Mixed Bag.......2005-11-19
I wanted to read more about Powell's trip after visiting the Grand Canyon and agree the author has done a good job of assembling the diaries and giving a commentary.
However, the overwhelming tone of the book is colored by the author's vendetta against Powell. Every action is interpreted in favor of the "noble boatmen" (like the author). There is much too much jumping to conclusions, for which he criticizes other authors. It became tiresome to read how Powell should have done this, that, or the other. Admittedly, the man had his faults, but the leader will always get the praise or blame. A more measured analysis would have been better.
The only book to read on Powell's journey.......2003-07-08
This book by Michael Ghiglieri is an outstanading documentary of the first exploration of the Grand Canyon by John Wesley Powell and his crew. While almost every other account of this amazing journey is based on Powell's journal and notes, Michael very carefully pulls together all the accounts of this trip using not only Powell's notes but also the journals of the crew, letters and other doucments not previously published. His book is well researched and very effectively debunks a number of misconceptions about Powell, his leadership skills, how and why the 3 members of his trip were killed (hint: it was NOT the Indians)and the contributions and skills of his crew.
Michael not only publishes word for word all the journals that survived, but also did an impressive amount of original research into the events that made up this exploration. He then uses his background as a professional river guide to pull it together into a very compelling and hard-to-put down tale of this fateful journey. This is must read for anyone interested in the real facts of this incredible adventure.
Book Description
A noble rescue mission descends into a nightmare of cruelty, starvation, and cannibalism, bringing to a close the European exploration of Africa. "Liebowitz and Pearson have written an illuminating saga of the dark days of colonialism."—National Geographic Adventure
Henry Morton Stanley undertook the greatest African expedition of the nineteenth century to rescue Emin Pasha, last lieutenant of the martyred General Gordon and governor of the southern Sudan. Emin had been cut off by an Islamic jihad to the north and was at the mercy of brutal slave traders. Instead of ten months, the trip took three years and cost the lives of thousands of people, as Stanley's column hacked its way across the last great, unexplored territory in Africa.
Stanley's secret agenda was territorial expansion on the model of Leopold's Congo or the British East India Company, and what is revealed so vividly in the diaries of those who accompanied him is the dark underside of both the man and the colonial impulse. The expedition took whatever it wanted from the Africans, and when Africans were killed defending their possessions, they didn't even rate an entry in Stanley's journal. 8 pages of illustrations, 2 maps.
Customer Reviews:
Henry Morton Stanley's bumbling misadventures in Africa make interesting reading........2007-10-08
Subtitled "Stanley's Mad Journey through the Congo", this book appealed to the historian in me. It also appealed to my armchair-traveler sense of adventure and exploration. There was much to learn here too because, prior to reading this book, all I knew about Henry Morton Stanley is that he is often remembered for searching for the explorer, David Livingstone in Africa and, upon finding him uttering the words "Mr. Livingstone I presume". This was in 1870. Years later, in 1886, Stanley went back to Africa with a huge expedition, the stated purpose of the mission to rescue Emin Pasha, the governor of the southern Sudan. This book is about that mission, the unstated nature of which was territorial expansion and a hoard of ivory. It makes fascinating reading.
Filled with details taken directly from some of the diaries of the men on the expedition, this is a story of one bumbling misadventure after another. Stanley started out with more than 700 men; barely 200 returned. There was illness, warfare, wrong judgments and mistakes. And through it all, Stanley was absolutely convinced that he was right in all things and had no trouble putting the blame on others. Perhaps it was this very pigheadedness that helped them survive at all. After all, Stanley had something to prove because he was an illegitimate child who was brought up in an orphanage. Later, he went to America and briefly fought for the confederacy in the Civil War but he deserted, became a journalist and eventually went back to England.
There are a lot of characters in this book and I must say I sometimes got confused about all the players. There were officers who tried their best to follow orders in horrible situations. There were hundreds of African natives who acted as porters and who often deserted. Then there were the sponsor with big money and nations looking for glory.
There was never enough food. Disease was everywhere. They had to deal with a notorious slave trader. They also had to deal with the conflicting ambitions of several nations, most notably the Belgians. They had to leave most of their provisions and belongings along the trail. There were wars with hostile natives. They were attacked by poisoned arrows to which they responded by using their guns and burning villages. There was the heat and the bugs and the wrong decisions and illnesses which added an extra two years to their trip. And then, when they finally found Emin Pasha, he didn't really want to be rescued. But he finally joined them along with about 600 Egyptians fleeing the Sudan with their families, slaves and household goods. Mostly, I felt sorry for the poor porters.
This book was a slow read but I kept coming back to it, mostly because it was an escape from my day-to-day life and added some perspective to my knowledge of history. It doesn't read like a novel though. It's full of facts and figures and conflicting points of view. I enjoyed it. However, I stop short of recommending it to everyone. It is for history buffs only.
You can't make this stuff up.......2007-07-09
These explorer stories are amazing in the ordeals they endured. Given how soft humankind is nowadays, I doubt any of us transported back to these times would have survived. How they did it is beyond me.
The Darkness of Henry Morton Stanley (nee John Rowlands).......2007-03-03
Liebowitz and Pearson have done a masterful job of skimming through the memoirs of all the members of the "Emin Pasha Relief Expedition" and bringing to us the most 'unadulterated' narrative of what might have actually happened. Stanley who spent time in a poor/workhouse in Wales as an unwanted 'bastard', never recovered from this disasterous childhood. It is a shame that he couldn't put it behind him, because it colored and ruined the real things that he accomplished.
He never stopped 'reinventing' himself or being the snake oil/confidence man he had to become to make his way in the world from an early age. He had to constantly 'CYA' and make sure (to himself) that he was always in the right (at least in print), and that all kudos and accolades would come to him along. His search for Livingston and Emin Pasha, lead to the first exploration of Central Africa by a European; but these accomplishments were never enough for Stanley who "failed" to return with either man (who it is questionable ever needed 'saving').
He was much like a street kid who goes around "tagging" buildings to show the world that he exists. Wherever he could he 'claimed' to have been the 'first' to see all types of geographical phenomenon, and where he could put his name on it (or some English Royal), Stanley Pool, Stanleyville, Stanley Falls, Mt.Stanley, etc. For example, he claimed to be the first to see the Ruwenzori/Mountains of the Moon (the largest which was called Mt.Stanley), when two of his officers saw it and told him of their discovery, not to mention that Emin Pasha had written to a friend in Germany about them two years before Stanley went looking for him. It reminds one that Sir Hilary didn't climb Mt.Everest by himself, not did Perry or Amundsen reach either of the Poles by themselves.
Besides being a self-booster and braggart, he was a viscious slave driver (literally), who flogged his people when it suited him, and treated his African porters more like slaves than workers. While he brought along his own food and entourage (which he never shared), his officers and porters were left to fend for themselves and many died of starvation and disease (because of malnourishment). The majority of people who went with him died, as they did on his other three expeditions, and of the people that he ended 'rescuing', more than sixty percent died; and were taken back to Egypt where most of them didn't want to go in the first place.
He then spent the rest of his life complaining about everyone and everything (except for one officer, who he said reminded him of himself as a young man), trying to discredit anyone who might have a claim to any of "his" glory. A tale of a man driven by more devils than any one man should have to handle.
"Dr. Livingstone, I Presume?".......2007-02-08
Stanley's Mad Journey: The Last Expedition
Even by the standards of nineteenth- century Imperialism, Henry Morton Stanley was excessive. His career, detailed in "The Last Expedition: Stanley's Mad Journey through the Congo," encompasses the worst of colonialism: racism, elitism, and opportunism, among others.
It is ironic that Stanley's life would be forever linked with that of Livingstone, who he found and addressed with the immortal words: "Dr. Livingstone, I presume?"
(Like: What other White Man would be in the middle of Darkest Africa?)
Stanley encouraged the popular perception of the Great White Hunter through his colorful, and self-serving, journalism for the tabloids of the day. He had no qualms in serving as Front Man for King Leopold of Belgium, who wanted to get on the African bandwagon with his own colony.
A European adventurer with the unlikely name of Mehemet Emin, who had adopted Arabic attire and manners, much like T.E. Lawrence, needed reinforcements, and it was agreed upon that Stanley would lead a rescue mission. Stanley developed a plan which, while it looked good on paper, was incredibly inefficient and downright foolhardy. His officers were the wrong men for the job: his equipment was inadequate; and his timing was wrong.
But the biggest problem was Stanley himself: arrogant, grandiose, disdainful of the Natives, and willful -he didn't have the right character traits for a leader. Illness, accident and murder claimed the lives of many of his men, yet he remained aloof and regal. It was a wonder than anyone survived the operation.
Like another reviewer, I read this book shortly after reading "The River of Doubt: Theodore Roosevelt's Darkest Journey." It provided an interesting contrast in styles of leadership and character: Roosevelt saw his expedition as a test of his own mettle; Stanley (like some other American presidents, although not TR), was thinking how his Legacy would hold up. Not well.
The Last Expedition is well-researched, entertaining, and well written. (****)
The Real Better Than Fiction.......2006-08-19
I have nothing more to add to the splendid reviews given this outstandingly informative work; however, I would recommend a fictionalized account of the same expedition written by Peter Forbath entitled " The Last Hero". It is no longer in print but can be purchased online from used book sellers.
I cannot emphasis strongly enough the impact Forbath's book had on my curiosity about 19th century exploration, particularly that of Stanley's 3 African enterprises. Whether you consider him a hero or villain, one cannot readily dismiss the tremendous contribution Henry Morton Stanley made to our understanding of and to the mapping of the " Dark Continent ". We will never see the likes of him again.
Both " The Last Expedition " and " The Last Hero " raise the standard of adventure, excitement, and intrigue to an altogether different level.
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In Search of Captain Cook: Exploring the Man through His Own Words
Daniel O'Sullivan
Manufacturer: I. B. Tauris
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ASIN: 1845114833
Release Date: 2008-04-15 |
Book Description
Captain James Cook was a master voyager and a seeker of knowledge who commanded three demanding scientific expeditions. He and his crews had encounters with peoples of the South Seas which led to mutual respect and trade, but also to misunderstanding and violence. His death at the hands of Hawaiians turned him into a legendary figure, a hero of the Enlightenment who was said to have sacrificed his life bringing "civilization" to the Pacific.
Yet despite everything that is known about this sea captain's many adventures, the man himself remains shrouded in mystery. In this book, Dan O'Sullivan casts vivid light on Cook's character, teasing out his personality from the pages of his own journals.
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The Definitive Journals of Lewis & Clark, Vol. 5: Through the Rockies to the Cascades
Meriwether Lewis , and
William Clark
Manufacturer: Bison Books
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ASIN: 0803280122 |
Book Description
Since the time of Columbus, explorers dreamed of a water passage across the North American continent. President Thomas Jefferson shared this dream. He conceived the Corps of Discovery to travel up the Missouri River to the Rocky Mountains and westward along possible river routes to the Pacific Ocean. Meriwether Lewis and William Clark led this expedition of 1804–6. Along the way they filled hundreds of notebook pages with observations of the geography, Indian tribes, and natural history of the trans-Mississippi West.
The late-summer and fall months of 1805 were the most difficult period of Lewis and Clark's journey. This volume documents their travels from the Three Forks of the Missouri River in present-day Montana to the Cascades of the Columbia River on today's Washington-Oregon border, including the expedition's progress over the rugged Bitterroot Mountains, along the nearly impenetrable Lolo Trail. Along the way, the explorers encounter Shoshones, Flatheads, Nez Perces, and other Indian tribes, some of whom had never before met white people.
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The Age of Leif Eriksson (Exploration Through the Ages)
Richard Humble
Manufacturer: Franklin Watts
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Binding: School & Library Binding
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ASIN: 0531107418 |
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