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Blue Latitudes: Boldly Going Where Captain Cook Has Gone Before |  | Author: Tony Horwitz
Publisher: Picador
Category: Book
List Price: $16.00
Buy Used: $0.29
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Seller: internationalbooks
Rating:  98 reviews
Sales Rank: 42576
Media: Paperback
Pages: 496
Number Of Items: 1
Shipping Weight (lbs): 0.9
Dimensions (in): 8.2 x 5.5 x 1
ISBN: 0312422601
Dewey Decimal Number: 910.92
EAN: 9780312422608
ASIN: 0312422601
Publication Date: August 1, 2003
Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days
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| Features:
| • | ISBN13: 9780312422608 | | • | Condition: NEW | | • | Notes: Brand New from Publisher. No Remainder Mark. |
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| Editorial Reviews:
Amazon.com Review
Captain James Cook's three epic 18th-century explorations of the Pacific Ocean were the last of their kind, literally completing the map of the world. Yet despite his monumental discoveries, principally in the South Pacific, Cook the man has remained an enigma. In retracing key legs of the circumnavigator's journey, Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Tony Horwitz chronicles the cultural and environmental havoc wrought by the captain's opening of the unspoiled Pacific to the West, as well as the alternately indifferent and passionate reactions Cook's name evokes during the writer's journeys through Polynesia, Australia, the Aleutians, and the explorer's native England. Horwitz skillfully weaves a biography and travel narrative with warm humor that is natural and human-scale, and his restless inquisitiveness quickly infects the reader. While striking dichotomies abound throughout that journey--Maori toughs who adopt Nazi imagery to symbolize their own fight against white domination, millennia-old Polynesian sexual mores that would shame the Reeperbahn, a sense that Christianity decimated native cultures at least as effectively as Western venereal diseases did--few are more poignant than the ones that abound in Cook's own life. This fine work is an adventurous reminder that answers to historical riddles are elusive at best--and seldom as compelling as the myriad new questions they pose. --Jerry McCulley
Product Description
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.
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| Customer Reviews:
Showing reviews 1-5 of 98
 Fun Book September 22, 2009
W. Millar (San Diego)
This book is a wonderful combination of a history book (Captain Cook) and a travel narrative. The author is very thorough and has a good sense of humor. Captain Cook is one of the greatest explorers of all time and this book will inform you and entertain you at the same time.
A real unique biography August 22, 2009
A. Ahmad
I had purchased this book after reading the book on Magellan. I would reccomend that book as well. Magellan's story got me interested in other explorers and so I started looking for a book on Cook, of whom I knew just a little. I looked for a good biography on cook and came across this book. It seemed different becuase It wasn't a straight forward biography. I didn't know at first how this would work out becuase I really enjoyed the Magellan book. But I really enjoyed this book as well. You do get a very good biography of Cook but you also get to enjoy the author's journey which although not as dramatic is a great break from the heavy life of cook. This unique combination keeps you interested and brings Cooks discoveries into the present. A thoroughly enjoyable book. Highly recommended.
A plain, zealous man June 4, 2009
C. Ebeling (PA USA)
1 out of 1 found this review helpful
In his three most recent books, of which "Blue Latitudes" is the middle, Tony Horwitz has gone where someone else has gone before. But those someone elses were a long time ago and he is curious about the historical truth to be found in the places they went as well as the way it reverberates in contemporary culture. His products are immensely readable, intelligent journalistic hybrids of history, travel and human folly. He always delivers surprises just when we think we'd learned everything there is to know about his topics in school.
"Blue Latitudes," as its subtitle states, "boldly goes where Captain Cook has gone before." Accordingly, Horwitz leaves his Virginian home for Tahiti and other exotic South Pacific locales, New Zealand, Australia, Alaska and Hawaii, hitting the high points of Cook's three groundbreaking charting and scientific marine expeditions that took place from 1768 until his death on 14 February 1779 in Hawaii. His was a mission that epitomized the values of the Enlightenment, that yielded information still relied upon today. Though Cook did not intend to slaughter or conquer the cultures he encountered, the introduction to Europeans was the door to extinction for the native cultures. Visiting the contemporary descendants of the original populations, Horwitz mostly finds that paradise has been paved over in more than one sense. A vast range of ignorance, apathy, revisionism and mythologizing have disfigured historical knowledge.
Horwitz alternately marvels at Cook's achievements and deplores what has become of the places he left behind. Sometimes, he just laughs or gets seasick. Horwitz begins his adventure by signing on for a very long week aboard the replica of Cook's first ship, the Endeavor. His companion throughout the South Pacific and the journey to the Captain's native Yorkshire is an English ex-pat living in Australia, Roger Williamson, whose uninhibited character lands them in some interesting situations, including a reenactment festival in Australia that dissolves into beer cooler races and wet T-shirt contests. Through all of it, though, Horwitz never loses his gaze on Cook, managing to make sense of an elusive personality and his mysteriously violent end. As Horwitz, Roger and the gentle Cliff Thornton, the president of the Cook Society in London, gather on the site more than two centuries later to commemorate the grim anniversary, their collective personalities and goals echo the lessons of the past and present.
Very good February 7, 2009
Graybeard (USA)
This is a skillful interweaving of two stories: (1) the 18th century maritime explorations of Captain James Cook, and (2) the author's travels to places that Cook visited or lived in. This book also skillfully blends history, geography, biography, biology, anthropology, sociology, linguistics and travel in a delicious down-to-earth way. If you've never listened to an audiobook before, consider getting the audiobook version of this book instead of the print version. One of the advantages of the audiobook version is that the book's reader, Daniel Gerroll, delights the reader with no less than a half dozen different dialects of English, thereby helping to transport the listener to the various places that are visited in this story.
 4-STAR READING ABOUT THE COOK TRAVELS December 31, 2008
archiveman2977 (Central Texas)
GOOD 4-STAR READING FOR MY WIFE WHO IS A BIG FAN OF CAPTAIN COOK WHO SAILED ALONG WITH DARWIN IN ANOTHER SHIP.
Showing reviews 1-5 of 98
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