a (mercifully) non-PC view of Captain Cook

books:


	• Blue Latitudes: Boldly Going Where Captain Cook Has Gone Before Tony Horwitz Picador, 2003 - 496 pages average customer review:based on 90 reviews view larger image
	for more information click here

highly recommended

Almost like being there

Blue latitudes is an excellent book about Cook's adventures in the Pacific and about the person Cook. Mr. Horwitz entertains in a marvolous way and as a reader one feels to the core the atmosphere of the places visted by Cook and how they have changed today. One feels, having read the book, the inclination to further explore Cook and his travels.

a (mercifully) non-PC view of Captain Cook

In Blue Latitudes journalist Tony Horwitz follows in the footsteps of Captain Cook, beginning with a week working as a member of the crew on board a replica of Cook's ship Endeavor. I'd always thought of Cook as this stereotypical British officer, all his buttons properly polished and looking down a very long nose at all these dreadful loincloth-clad natives. In fact, Cook was born in a pigsty, was subject in his youth to a strong Quaker influence, and worked his way up from shoveling coal to captain in the British Navy. He wrote about the aboriginal people he met with respect and admiration. His name is now a bad word all over the Pacific, but in truth Cook was the best white man they'd ever meet. This already lively narrative is made more so by Horwitz' travelling buddy Roger, one of the most cynical and funniest guys ever to walk through the pages of a book.

for more information click here

great history/adventure/travel book

a very fun read. Reminds you how amazing Cook was...well before the he was roasted. :-)

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.

for more information click here

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.

for more information click here

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

Boldly Going Where Captain Cook Has Gone Before

Two 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.

for more information click here

hot