Eugene Buchanan

Order by Mail

To order by check, send check or money order ($17 per book, including shipping) to Paddling Life/Brothers on the Bashkaus, P.O. Box 775589, Steamboat Springs, CO 80477. Include mailing address for where book(s) is to be mailed, as well as specific dedication notes. Orders will be mailed as soon as check is received.

If ordering by credit card, send dedication specifics to eugene@paddlinglife.net.

Recent Praise for Brothers on the Bashkaus

Cl;ick here for whacky Russian river-running footage

“A Class-V ride through both big waters and a fast-changing culture.”
—Jon Bowermaster, National Geographic Adventure author/adventurer

“This is a book in which the author is on fire with his subject. Eugene Buchanan studies, chases, and pours down one of the world’s wildest rivers in a journey sometimes terrifying, often chilling, but always mesmeric and drenched with resonance. The story is swiftly moving, yet it superbly delineates the cultural and political context out of which this expedition arose. Buchanan is a gifted narrator, with seeming total recall and a lucid candor and self-awareness, as well as a talent for painting topographical views of gorges and rapids that have an almost surreal power. Brothers on the Bashkaus is, in a fashion, an elegy for a lost moment of cultural and environmental first contact. It is a torrent of a book… Take the plunge!”
—Richard Bangs, founding partner of Mountain Travel/Sobek, author of 11 books, including Mystery of the Nile, Adventures without End, The Lost River, River Gods, and Riding the Dragon’s Back

“Adventure paddling is fun enough, but it becomes epic, zany, and outrageous when it’s set in the manic madness of modern Russia. Imagine Hunter S. Thompson—without the drugs—running Class VI. Can’t conjure up the image? Sit down on a comfortable chair, get some raw pork fat for munchies, and read Eugene Buchanan’s Brothers on the Bashkaus for a wild, hungry ride in improbable boats with a bunch of crazies. The book exposes the unadulterated spirit of whitewater adventure—stripped clean of all the fancy stuff, like paddles and lifejackets.”
—Jon Turk, author of In the Wake of the Jomon and Cold Oceans

“Buchanan’s blood is two parts river. This is a memorable tale of adventure, friendship, and a confluence, or collision, of cultures. Buchanan and his cohorts get tossed almost by happenstance onto the wildest of rivers in a land where the gear is homemade, local horsemen go crazy on strong tea, memorials to dead paddlers perch on the banks, and, as at an execution, nothing can happen until a last cigarette is smoked.”
—Peter Heller, author of Hell or High Water, Outside magazine contributor

“Your fate is tied to strangers in a strange land in—strangest of all—a craft hewn from the forest primeval… a monster Siberian whitewater river before you. A reader could want for no better guide than Eugene Buchanan, an expert storyteller who knows firsthand that if you are good, lucky, and don’t mind daily fat cubes, the best expeditions sometimes emerge out of the worst predicaments. Superb.”
—Todd Balf, author of The Last River and the forthcoming Comet: The Untold Story of Major Taylor and How He Beat the Color Line (Crown Publishing, 2007)

“Eugene Buchanan’s paddling expertise and sharp reportorial eye will sweep you breathlessly down one of the world’s wildest, toughest, and most remote rivers, in company with the knights-errant of Siberian whitewater. A fascinating cultural and adventure read.”
—Peter Stark, author of The Last Breath and At the Mercy of the River

Review Links:

More Reviews

In 1992, Eugene Buchanan, publisher and editor of Paddler magazine, traveled with three friends to the former Soviet Union, joined up with a group of Latvian paddlers they’d never met and ran one of the hardest, most dangerous rivers in Russia, the Bashkaus. A few years later, NOLS (National Outdoor Leadership School) used the Bashkus trip as a case study to demonstrate why some expeditions succeed and others fail. So, do they make it or not? As you expectantly turn every page of Buchanan’s new book chronicling their journey, Brothers on the Bashkaus, you’ll almost forget you asked that question as you get sucked into the story and get to know the cast of characters. Starting with the making of the raft, which includes “300 peeled hot dogs of larch [wood],” logs, webbing and a few pieces of metal salvaged from a cot, to the rationing and counting out of every single bite of food, including the jellybeans Buchanan and friends brought, to the Russian version of rock, paper, scissors (dubbed “RoShamBolovich”), Buchanan draws you in to the adventure as if you were there eating pork fat and fish-eye soup right along with them. His detail-rich recounting of their adventures is also punctuated with brief yet insightful commentaries and bits of history. As much an exploration into the culture of post-Soviet Union Russia as it is a story about boating and bonding, Brothers on the Bashkaus has you terrified one minute and laughing your ass off the next. Be forewarned: You might find yourself staying up all night to finish it.
–Wend magazine

The genre of the adventure-sports memoir is clogged with more refuse than the summit of Everest is with rich white businessmen, gear-toting Sherpas and discarded oxygen bottles. Rarely do adventure-sports authors tread any daring literary ground; with a few exceptions, the whole lot should be tossed into the same crevasses they negotiate, the rivers they paddle or the pits of the fiery volcanoes they climb. Brothers on the Bashkaus, by Colorado author Eugene Buchanan, is an exception. (After all, the Colorado author writes for National Geographic Adventure and Men’s Journal and edits Paddling Life.) On the surface, Bashkaus tells the story of Buchanan’s 1992 river run down some of the most difficult whitewater in Siberia. But it also ventures into more intriguing territory surrounding the culture and climate of remote, post-Soviet Russia.
–Rick White, Westword

Author Video