The Last River: The Tragic Race for Shangri-la (Hardcover)

by Todd Balf (Author)

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review
As the 20th century neared its close, few corners of the globe remained unexplored. One exception was a "monstrous and largely obscure river in southeastern Tibet" that had already resisted several British expeditions: the Yarlung Tsangpo. Raging through a nearly impenetrable gorge in one of the most remote places on the planet, it was a place variously reported as the source behind the Western myth of Shangri-La and the "Everest of rivers." In 1998 a team of middle-aged American men--all of them expert river runners--aimed to notch their paddles with this last great stretch of virgin whitewater that many knowledgeable river people considered "beyond the means of what humans could do in a boat." But after securing crucial funding from National Geographic and flying halfway around the world, the team of four paddlers (three in expedition kayaks, one in a whitewater canoe) arrived in-country to find the river at flood stage. Their leader, a man with a "stubborn allegiance for things that look hopeless," decided they would continue anyway. Those familiar with the story know what happened next.

Fans of the man-versus-nature genre popularized by Into Thin Air and The Perfect Storm will not be disappointed by Todd Balf's fast-flowing reconstruction of events. All the elements are on board: rugged individuals, intensive logistical planning, a strange, unforgiving landscape--and death. While Balf, a former editor at Outside magazine, delivers the expected adrenaline-fueled adventure, the nuanced emotional and psychological dimensions that allowed Krakauer and Junger to rise above the genre are less in evidence in The Last River. Portages through personal histories, for instance, bog down with character portraits that sometimes read more like screen treatments ("His face bears out the Baby Boomer ideal: seasoned but searching"). But once Balf plunges into the heart of his narrative--the river navigation itself--he finds the right stroke:

Paddling hard to get to the protected shore-side of a house-sized rock, he missed the move, then plunged over another small drop. Flipped again, Jamie got spit out and tried to roll but couldn't. Seconds later he felt the boat getting pushed beneath an undercut rock....

What happened on the Tsangpo is not so much a tragedy as another sad loss in the increasingly competitive realm of extreme sports. One wonders about the actual tragedies (i.e., cultural fallout, environmental degradation) ready to unfold as the world's last remote places become playgrounds for the burgeoning adventure-travel industry. The Last River avoids speculating. It's first and foremost an action-packed chronicle of an expedition gone bad that will appeal to landlubbers and water rats alike. --Langdon Cook

From Publishers Weekly
In 1998 a team of world-class whitewater kayakers arrived in Tibet to confront a Himalayan river so remote and unexplored that they relied on satellite imagery to map out their planned descent. Somewhere along its uncharted stretch were magnificent waterfallsDthe source, according to Balf, of the legend of Shangri-la, a utopian land of incredible beauty. This was a river whose width matched the Mississippi in some spots and that ran through the deepest gorge on the planet. The inherent challenges of the Tsangpo's wild and bouldered rapids were compounded by a record monsoon season that had morphed the river into an unnavigable menace, forcing the team to do most of their exploring via intense overland portaging. Balf's account of this journey surges with superlatives, often defying the reader's imagination: river rocks the size of buildings, cliffs rising 25,000 feet, 30-foot standing waves, and a group of highly trained, intelligent men attempting to kayak the monster, weighed down with $6,000 worth of gear. Balf, who writes for Outside and Men's Journal, is to be congratulated on his sensitive fusion of adventure and sports writing. In his telling, the Tsangpo is alternately "a huge hydraulic event," "a brawling river that drops out of the sky," and, tragically, for one of the bolder paddlers, a place to meet "God and... be with him for all eternity." His account is a well-balanced tale in which the technicalities of exploring and paddling share space with ruminations on man's spiritual quest and mortality. It may be the only book to offer both a glossary of kayaking terms and a short history of the legend of Shangri-la. (Sept.)
Copyright 2000 Reed Business Information, Inc.

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 304 pages
• Publisher: Crown; 1st edition (September 12, 2000)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0609606255
• ISBN-13: 978-0609606254
• Product Dimensions: 9.5 x 6.7 x 1.3 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.4 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 3.0 out of 5 stars See all reviews (41 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #1,657,379 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

11 of 11 people found the following review helpful:

2.0 out of 5 stars The last River - A Journey most won't want to take, August 20, 2001

By	T.W Trotter (Toronto, Ontario, Canada) - See all my reviews

This review is from: The Last River: The Tragic Race for Shangri-la (Paperback)

"Extreme", "lantern jawed", "boulders the size of buildings". Mix these three cliches, stir in an almost incomprehensible mix of first names and some [partial] biographies and you have the essence of Todd Balf's The Last River - The Tragic Race of Shangri-La. Ostensibly the tale of a river exploration by kayak gone awry it's focus is continuously blurred by disorganized snippets of arcana and personal information about the participants and (too many) peripheral players in this tale of a grand scheme gone bad. The real tragedy of this story seems to be the fact that Balf is the self- appointed chronicler of it. Balf continuously mires the reader in minutiae that is scattered seemingly hodge-podge throughout the story. The timeline of the book wavers between serpentine and non-existent and further clouds an already confusing tale. The story itself, the story of a group of experienced paddlers seeking the ultimate challenge on one of the mightiest rivers in the far east, has unlimited potential to be engaging. Instead, Balf scrawls such a circuitous, hackneyed missive, that the weakly developed principal characters rush down a river of unpredictable, choppy and confusing prose long before they reach the river that shares those qualities. In the Author's Note Balf writes of his struggle to give shape to an original article about the topic of his book. The reader is predisposed to think that Balf underwent the same struggle with the book..and lost. Balf seems overwhelmed by the topic at hand: too much information, too much forced drama and too many characters have resulted in an unruly pastiche of a story. In the end it is the story that suffers: the clarity of the participant's vision has been lost, the essence of the experience that beckoned them left unexplored. For [the money] CAN there are more entrancing journeys for the reader to take.

11 of 11 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars The River Wild, September 17, 2000

By	Tommie Lee (Colorado Springs, CO United States) - See all my reviews

Anyone who enjoys stories about the Himalayas, Tibet, or people pushing themselves to peak performance, needs to read this. It's not quite the five-star material of Krakauer's "Into Thin Air", but it's very close. Mr. Balf uses the accounts passed to him by the members of the doomed October 1998 Tsangpo expedition so well that you forget he wasn't there. The History is well used and interesting. The descriptions of the mammoth arena in which the story takes place are highly vibrant. And, the relationships of the men on the team are portrayed with realism, as well as a careful depth that could rival the Gorge itself. These are not people out for glory alone. These are people with a passion. Read this book, and see how they fare against one of the last untamed patches of earth we have left.

12 of 13 people found the following review helpful:

1.0 out of 5 stars Waste of Money, too, November 15, 2000

By A Customer

I couldn't agree more with Michael Craig Johnson's review. Structurally, this book is a mess, as well as being a completely uninspiring story of guys with bad judgement. I have never seen a real-life adventure story without any, repeat any, maps of the area or pictures of the participants. Balf could surely have found one picture, or showed us one of the maps mentioned on page 13, and never referenced again. It takes the group 105 pages of disjointed biographical info to get to Lhasa. There we meet more people we have no reason to care about. The group gets on the river on page 143. After some history and more bios, the group is off the river by page 227. After less than two weeks, the action is over. Even the river scenes fail to give any sense of place to help the reader along.

Mr. Balf obviously said what had to be said about the expedition in his magazine article. It was no service to the buyers to produce a whale of a book from the original minnow. As Mr. Johnson says, don't buy this book. I wouldn't even borrow it, or lend it to a friend. Instead, check out Alfred Lansing's classic, "Endurance". With maps nd pictures.