Binding: Paperback
Dewey Decimal Number: 910.92
EAN: 9780312422608
ISBN: 0312422601
Label: Picador
Manufacturer: Picador
Number Of Items: 1
Number Of Pages: 496
Publication Date: 2003-08-01
Publisher: Picador
Studio: Picador

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.
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

Customer Rating:
Summary: Bad Day at Black Rock
Comment:





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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Customer Rating:
Summary: Cook'n with Horwitz
Comment: 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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Customer Rating:
Summary: Another good read
Comment: 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.

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Customer Rating:
Summary: Engaging, if scattered
Comment: 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.

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Customer Rating:
Summary: Paradise debunked (Again!)
Comment: 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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