Blue Latitudes: Boldly Going Where Captain Cook Has Gone Before | Tony Horwitz

Blue Latitudes: Boldly Going Where Captain Cook Has Gone Before | Tony Horwitz | Paradise debunked (Again!)

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Blue Latitudes: Bo...

	Blue Latitudes: Boldly Going Where Captain Cook Has Gone Before Tony Horwitz Picador, 2003 - 496 pages average customer review:based on 93 reviews view larger image
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highly recommended

Boldly Going Where Captain Cook Has Gone BeforeTwo centuries after James Cook's epic voyages of discovery, Tony Horwitz takes readers on a wild ride across hemispheres and centuries to recapture the Captain?s adventures and explore his embattled legacy in today?s Pacific. Horwitz, a Pulitzer Prize-winner and author of Confederates in the Attic, works as a sailor aboard a replica of Cook?s ship, meets island kings and beauty queens, and carouses the South Seas with a hilarious and disgraceful travel companion, an Aussie named Roger. He also creates a brilliant portrait of Cook: an impoverished farmboy who became the greatest navigator in British history and forever changed the lands he touched. Poignant, probing, antic, and exhilarating, Blue Latitudes brings to life a man who helped create the global village we inhabit today.

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Another good read

While this is one of his earlier books, i just discovered this author and love his interplay of current experience and history. As in his other works, a new level of understanding emerges about the earliest interplay of European contact with the native peoples and, unfortunately, the consequences that are with us today. Highly recommended.

Paradise debunked (Again!)

Well, consider paradise thoroughly debunked, between Horwitz's far-ranging journeys of disassembly here and J. Maartin Troost's more narrowly focused The Sex Lives of Cannibals: Adrift in the Equatorial Pacific about real life on a South Pacific speck.

Horwitz applies his witty and accessible style to a popular cultural, anthropological, historical, and gastronomical view of Cook's travel stops and his impact on them. He even finds parallels to his earlier "Confederates in the Attic" (see my review there) in the way that the distant descendants of both English and native island-dwellers see their shared and separate histories. On these journeys, covering a wider geographic and ethnic range, Horwitz finds more room to spread his reportorial wings, and the results can be hilarious.

He is also often joined by an often-drunk Australian friend (Horwitz is married to an Australian and lived there for a few years), and the interplay between the two and the sights and people they meet on the way adds to the insights and insanity that ensues. But throughout the book, Horwitz weaves the background of Cook and his ships, crews, and journeys so that we learn more than we realize.

If you are interested in a more narrowly focused biography of Cook, consider (in addition to the ones Horowitz lists in his biography) Cook : The Extraordinary Voyages of Captain James Cook by Nicholas Thomas, which I review there and which came out shortly after Blue Latitudes.

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Bad Day at Black Rock

In my research for Wai-nani, High Chiefess of Hawaii, I read a dozen accounts of Captain James Cook's deadly encounter with the natives of Hawaii in 1779. This included not only the Captains' journal, but that of seaman, John Ledyard, and that of first mate, Lt. King. When Tony Horwitz declared that in Blue Latitudes he would take us boldly where Captain Cook had gone before, I didn't expect to learn anything new. What I found was the most informative, well-researched, fun account of the famous explorer to date. Horwitz likens Cook's three voyages of discovery throughout Polynesia and the Northwest to that of the Startrek's explorations into deep space. His journalistic style and breezy sense of humor keep historical events fresh. I stuck closely to Horwitz account of the events in Kealakekua Bay in the telling of Wai-nani's story. Her first person narrative allows the reader to know what was happening in the Hawaiian culture on the fateful day the navigator lost his life. Controversy over the actual events that took place that week and why rages on, but Horwitz provides an even-handed,thoughtful point of view.

LindaBallouAuthor.com
Wai-nani, High Chiefess of Hawai'i-Her Epic Journey

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Cook'n with Horwitz

An author such as Tony Horwitz is a rare find.
After reading his latest release (as of this review), "A Voyage Long and Strange", I had to backtrack to "Blue Latitudes". Glad I did.

Horwitz' slant to history is savvy with modern day adventure, wit and insight.
Following in the wake of Captain James Cook's three world voyages of the eighteenth century, the author painstakingly confronts hundreds of present day individuals from several South Pacific Islands, New Zealand, Australia, Hawaii and the Aleutian Islands to better understand the gist and consequences of Cook's discoveries.
This angle of story-telling makes history entertaining. Not a dull moment.

A plucky, energetic and informative read.

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Engaging, if scattered

Horwitz's gambit is to retrace Cook's voyages as he chronicles his life. It's a good idea, and it's interesting (if depressing) to learn what Cook's stops have turned into. (Tahiti, once a paradise, is now a shabby tourist trap.) Horwitz's own explorations are given equal time to Cook's, which means that the biography of Cook is somewhat less detailed than you might want it to be. But he's an engaging writer.

Check my list, "Books About Explorers," for more recommendations.

reviews: page 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10

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