The Lost River: A Memoir of Life, Death, and Transformation on Wild Water

With straightforward storytelling, Bangs recounts a nearly 30-year obsession with rafting some of the swiftest, most dangerous waters on earth. Bangs (Rivergods), editor-at-large of Expedia.com, Microsoft's online travel service, tells his tale with the ease of a worldly relative who swoops in for Thanksgiving dinner and regales the table with stories that keep everyone's attention. Readers will especially enjoy the descriptions of Africa in which Bangs makes both the water and its wildlife bristle with peril. Even a pair of marabou storks acquire a sinister aspect-- ""with their bald red heads, dandy gray feathers edged in white, fleshy pink necks, rattling bills, and wings folded into an oval, they looked like undertakers in morningcoats."" And the lugubrious undertones are not mere exaggeration: in the 1970s, two of Bangs's rafting partners, one his closest friend, drowned in the course of their adventures. The title refers to Ethiopia's Tekeze River, which Bangs and his friend had intended to run together and to which Bangs ultimately returns. Though Bangs occasionally falls prey to macho clich s (""I felt I had to prove to myself that I had the right stuff"") and hackneyed constructions (""So much water, so little time""), readers will meet such instances like rocks in midstream: distressing for a moment, but easily passed, and hardly enough to ruin an otherwise enjoyable trip. (Aug.)