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Outside magazine, April 2001

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Death of a River Guide, by Richard Flanagan (Grove Press, $24). In this remarkable homage to Faulkner's As I Lay Dying, Aljaz Cosini is a middle-aged rafting guide for ecotourists—gone to seed after the death of his two-month-old daughter—who finds himself trapped beneath a waterfall on Tasmania's Franklin River. As he drowns, his life and the lives of his family and forebears flash before his eyes, his face "endlessly washed and scrubbed by this tide of the past." One of Australia's most acclaimed young writers after the appearance of his first novel, The Sound of One Hand Clapping, Flanagan possesses a wicked ear for the insincerities and parasitism that bedevil the relationship between guide and guided; Cosini's contempt for his "punters" (clients) and the self-loathing it entails lead to his fatal plunge. Flanagan's gift for magical realism and Cosini's elegiac visions—encompassing his logger-trapper father, his Slovenian mother, and the long-repressed skeletons in the family closet (British convicts and Aboriginal folk whose blood will out)—elevate the narrative, while Tasmania's sad history is revealed through a series of bizarre anecdotes and images: Cosini's immigrant ancestors sell their teeth to the rich to pay their debts; his father lays on elaborate barbeques, attended by possums and wombats, for his wife's ghost; a blackwood tree grows up through an abandoned railroad car in the forest, carring it aloft. By the time Cosini comes to the end of his harrowing tale, buzzed by news helicopters and mocked by search-and-rescue men discussing the removal of his body, he has more than earned his final epiphany, "the thought that death is nowhere as violent as life." —Caroline Fraser

Walking the Bible: A Journey by Land Through the Five Books of Moses, by Bruce Feiler (William Morrow, $26). Yearning for a concrete connection to the Hebrew Bible he studied as a child, Feiler (author of Learning to Bow: Inside the Heart of Japan) sets off to experience Scripture as "a living, breathing entity," hoofing it across trails once trod by Abraham and Moses, seeking to "walk in its footsteps, live in its canyons, meet its characters, and ask its questions." Accompanied by the endearingly Yoda-like Avner Goren—a renowned Israeli archaeologist and pudgy yet preternaturally spry guide—Feiler treks three continents, four war zones, and five countries. Along the way, he licks a pillar of salt near the Dead Sea, staggers around the Sinai relying on the kindness of Bedouins, and examines a shrub said to spring from the roots of the original burning bush. Using the Bible as Baedeker has its hazards: Feiler and Goren are confronted often by security forces and forced to hide their Bibles at the Temple Mount. And if Feiler's prose is occasionally pedestrian, well, the same might be said of the book that inspired it. But ultimately Feiler's journey becomes a travelogue not simply of places but of people, those for whom the Bible is still birthplace and battleground—the Palestinians, Kurds, and kibbutzniks whose words and works keep reinventing the Holy Land as "a literary landscape as rich and bountiful as Shakespeare's England, Flaubert's France, or Joyce's Ireland." —C.F.

The Immortal Class: Bike Messengers and the Cult of Human Power, by Travis Hugh Culley (Villard, $20). "I am a bike messenger," writes Travis Hugh Culley, "a lackey, a laborer, a punk-ass kid who calls this place his home."The place is Chicago, and this memoir is a rousing cycling manifesto and an exuberant paean to the Windy City. An aspiring playwright, Culley instead found immortality in his day job as Service First courier number 39, delivering upwards of 70 packages per shift. His memoir takes us deep into the messenger culture of the 1990s, where couriers "skitch" rides by latching onto passing cars, "bum-rush" security desks, and practice home wound stitchery after getting "doored" by exiting taxi passengers. Culley's customized Cannondale isn't a machine; it's an extension of his own body--"All the parts work as a single organism"--and the courier-cum-author ably conveys the adrenaline rush known only to those who've braved the urban rush-hour wilderness on two wheels: "'How can all this fit into my eyes!' I wondered to myself, half amazed, half sick from the visual intoxication." Culley's readers will forgive such chunks of drama-major overwriting in exchange for a glimpse into this proud, manic, grotty world.--Bruce Barcott

In Search of Captain Zero, by Allan C. Weisbecker (Tarcher Putnam, $25). Allan Weisbecker and Christopher Connor were lifelong Long Island buds: In the sixties, 20-year-old Connor taught 17-year-old Weisbecker to surf the rocky points off Montauk; in the seventies, the duo financed their wave-riding habit with pot-smuggling runs to North Africa and South America. As their friends grew up and got lives, Weisbecker and Connor found themselves old and alone on their Endless Summer idylls. "It was only Christopher and I who were truly left," writes Weisbecker, "living the life." Then, in the early 1990s, Connor lit out on his own for Mexico and points south--and was never heard from again. Four years later, Weisbecker decided to follow his friend's trail; In Search of Captain Zero chronicles his six-month, 4,000-mile quest. Like a Jimmy Buffett character come to life, the author uses his road time to recount past smuggling escapades, wax philosophical about surfing, and mull over his feelings for the señorita he left behind. He meets the usual dharma bum's cast of knuckleheads, German vagabonds, outlaw expats, and finally--Dude, no way!--a worse-for-wear Christopher Connor himself, who greets his old friend with shocking news: "I'm smoking crack these days." At which point Weisbecker's aging-bad-boy frolic deepens into a subtly affecting tale of friendship and duty. In Search of Captain Zero deserves a spot on the microbus dashboard as a hell of a cautionary tale about finding paradise and smoking it away. —B.B.

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