index index index index This non-fiction book is about the expedition of John Wesley Powell and their pioneering and death-defying exploration of the Grand Canyon in 1869. Powell, a college professor who had lost an arm at Shiloh, was well-prepared to map the canyons of the Colorado and do a scientific andgeological survey. Unfortunately, he was no leader, and the expedition suffered terribly for it. He rounded up a crew of mountain men and ne'er-do-wells, as well as a few neurotic former Civil War veterans and set off in rowboats that couldn't have been more ill-suited to running the violent rapids of the Colorado. Powell and his men saw amazing sites, but they almost perished multiple times. Finally there was a mutiny in which several men ended up leaving the party and trying to hike out of the canyon(they were never seen again); the others ran the rapids and somehow lived to tell the tale.

While I liked learning more about Powell's expedition, Dolnick has little sense of pacing, and uses annoying modern metaphors every time he gets the chance. The result is a plodding read on what should have been a can't-miss story. Down the Great Unknown has its merits, but the definitive book on Powell and the Grand Canyon has yet to be written.

Reviewer: Liz Clare, co-author of the historical novel "To the Ends of the Earth: The Last Journey of Lewis & Clark" 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.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. I enjoyed this book very much. So much that I have loaned it to family and friends to enjoy.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.On 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 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.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 suria review reviews analysis analyze