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Title: Blue Latitudes : Boldly Going Where Captain Cook Has Gone Before by Tony Horwitz ISBN: 0-312-42260-1 Publisher: Picador USA Pub. Date: 01 August, 2003 Format: Paperback Volumes: 1 List Price(USD): $15.00 |
Average Customer Rating: 4.23 (52 reviews)
Rating: 5
Summary: An entertaining sampling of Cook for the non-historian
Comment: Tony Horwitz spends a year and a half visiting many of the places Captain Cook visited from 1768 - 1779. The book culminates with Cook's violent death in modern day Hawaii.
The book alternates back and forth between Cook's 18th century experience and Mr. Horwitz's modern day travels. Horwitz does an excellent job of interpreting the various sources available and giving an account that the historical layperson can relate to. Key characters include the author, Cook, the colorful Joseph Banks (the Endevour's Botanist) and Horowitz's even more colorful traveling companion Roger Williamson. Horwitz paints a picture of Cook as an austere, yet fair man-seemingly driven to the edges of the earth. As driven as Cook is to explore the world, Banks is driven to explore the anatomies of females from different Polynesian cultures. Roger is mainly content to explore the bottle and make wisecracks about Horwitz's adventure. If you think Blue Latitudes sounds like a dry historical piece, you're sorely mistaken. Any potential dryness is quickly quenched by Horwitz's wit, Banks's "botanizing" and Roger's boozing.
Much to my wife's amusement I found myself laughing out loud many times while reading Blue Latitudes. Despite that, I found myself strangely moved after reading the account of Cook's death. While the consequences of Cook's voyages are complex, you cannot help but feel a great admiration for this man who started with so little yet went so far. Great book, highly recommended.
Rating: 5
Summary: The Discovery and the Aftermath
Comment: In a way, this book comes in two flavors - Captain Cook's actual voyages, and the author's visiting the places that the captain had discovered. Of this, the three voyages are well known and have been written up sufficiently. But Horwitz puts an interesting slant on the natives Cook encountered rather than the discoveries themselves. We learn about the Tahitians and their customs, the Maoris of New Zealand, the Aborigines of Australia, and the people of Tonga, of Hawaii, and the Aleuts of Unalaska. He acquaints us with Cook's main helper, the biologist Joseph Banks, and some of his officers, such as William Bligh of later mutiny fame, and John Ledyard who is still remembered in Connecticut (ironically, the town bearing his name now sports a gigantic native Indian gambling casino).
And so the islands were pristine and at peace. It is the author's aim to show us how this has changed into murder, thievery and disease. There are not many of the natives left and those he found were most anxious to forget about Cook. his discoveries and their aftermath. It would be wrong, of course, to blame all this on Cook. If it had not been for him, somebody else would have discovered the islands of the Pacific - and probably with the same results.
The conclusion: One should not supplant an original culture with one's own imported one. Both will suffer and there will never be a satisfactory result. Yet such action continues into our 21st century.
Rating: 5
Summary: A great read
Comment: Horwitz has pulled off a great hybrid here-- part travel adventure, part mystery, part history.
An unfolding account of Cook's three world-changing voyages is interwoven with Horwitz's own journey in search of Cook himself. Horwitz manages to see both Cook the heroic discoverer and Cook the harbinger of the destruction of non-western civilizations. He can also balance the sweep and majesty of his historical material with the detail and grit of ludicrous modern bar-hopping.
Along the way Horwitz manages to give shape and form to what most of us sort of half-remember about Cook, while uncovering new bits of hard information and interpretive insight. And all through he uses a the deft hand and keen eye of a journalist to bring it all alive.
It's witty and funny and informative and gripping and moving all at the same time, as if Spielberg directed a documentary written by the History Channel but cast with the correspondents of the Daily Show. This does what the best history writing can do-- engage you even if you didn't think you knew or cared about the subject in the first place.
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Title: Confederates in the Attic : Dispatches from the Unfinished Civil War by Tony Horwitz ISBN: 067975833X Publisher: Random House Pub. Date: 22 February, 1999 List Price(USD): $14.95 |
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Title: Baghdad Without a Map: And Other Misadventures in Arabia by Tony Horwitz ISBN: 0452267455 Publisher: Plume Pub. Date: January, 1992 List Price(USD): $15.00 |
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Title: Krakatoa : The Day the World Exploded: August 27, 1883 by Simon Winchester ISBN: 0066212855 Publisher: HarperCollins Pub. Date: 01 April, 2003 List Price(USD): $25.95 |
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Title: One for the Road : Revised Edition by Tony Horwitz ISBN: 0375706135 Publisher: Vintage Pub. Date: 05 October, 1999 List Price(USD): $12.00 |
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Title: Pirate Hunter, The: The True Story of Captain Kidd by Richard Zacks ISBN: 0786884517 Publisher: Hyperion Pub. Date: 18 June, 2003 List Price(USD): $15.95 |
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