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Title: Blue Latitudes: Boldly Going Where Captain Cook Has Gone Before by Tony Horwitz ISBN: 0-8050-6541-5 Publisher: Henry Holt & Company, Inc. Pub. Date: 02 October, 2002 Format: Hardcover Volumes: 1 List Price(USD): $26.00 |
Average Customer Rating: 4.23 (52 reviews)
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.
Rating: 5
Summary: Horwitz worked as a sailor aboard a replica of Cook's ship
Comment: Blue Latitudes: Boldly Going Where Captain Cook Has Gone Before by Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Tony Horwitz is essential his travel memoir of a voyage taken some two centuries after James Cook's epic venture. Horwitz worked as a sailor aboard a replica of Cook's ship for the purpose of retracing that momentous voyage of discover; had the privilege of meeting island kings and beauty queens along the way; and encountered unique cultures, breathtaking sights, and formed cherished friendships. Ideal reading for dedicated armchair travelers, Blue Latitudes also contemplates the meaning Cook's journey, its historical events, and its lasting legacy for the modern day.
Rating: 3
Summary: Life imitates Star Trek
Comment: Here is Tony Horwitz, boldly going where Captain Cook has gone before, noting first of all Cook's similarities to Star Trek's Captain Kirk. Once he gets that justification for the book's subtitle out of the way, we are treated to a serviceable biography of Cook, coupled with an enjoyable travelogue of Horwitz's adventures.
At this late date Cook cannot be restored to his former place as a hero of Nineteenth Century Civilization. But, as Horwitz demonstrates, neither does he deserve to be reduced to a simple gaslight villain of the multi-culti crowd. Horwitz explores his origins and rather enigmatic personality, retracing his path, recording the thumps of colliding cultures on his voyages. Some encounters went very well, others badly, for both sides. Horwitz neatly punctures the noble savage stereotype at one point, relating the fate of a French explorer who was under the spell of Rousseau, and felt the islanders to be harmless innocents, "new sprung from Nature". The natives killed him anyway.
Horwitz plays his own travels mostly for laughs, chronicling himself in pratfall after pratfall, in the midst of crude, wisecracking Aussies and Kiwis. It's great fun, and we do occasionally draw some illuminating contrasts between his travels and Cook's. But it's mostly just fun, which, after all, is what travel is supposed to be.
Blue Latitudes is another insightful romp through distant lands--waters, in this case--with freelancer Tony Horwitz. Thank goodness for lovers of travel writing he can't seem to land a real job!
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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: 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: 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: 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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