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Books : Blue Latitudes CD: Boldly Going Where Captain Cook has Gone BeforeIn association with Amazon.comby: Tony Horwitz  List Price: $34.95 Amazon.com's Price: $27.26 You Save: $7.69 (22%)Prices subject to change. Availability: Usually ships in 24 hours
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Binding: Audio CDDewey Decimal Number: 910.92 EAN: 9780060510602 Format: Abridged, Audiobook ISBN: 0060510609 Label: HarperAudio Manufacturer: HarperAudio Number Of Items: 8 Publication Date: October 01, 2002 Publisher: HarperAudio Release Date: October 01, 2002 Studio: HarperAudio Sales Rank: 818604 Related Items:
Editorial Review: Product Description: James Cook's three epic journey's in the eighteenth century were the last great voyages of discovery. When he embarked for the Pacific in 1768, a third of the globe remained blank. By the time he died in 1779, Cook had explored more of the earth's surface than anyone in history. Adventuring in the captain's wake, Tony Horwitz relives his journeys and explores their legacy. He recaptures the rum-and-lash world of eighteenth century seafaring gang members, and the king of Tonga. Accompanied by a carousing Australian mate, he meets Miss Tahiti, visits the roughest bar in Alaska, and uncovers the secret behind the red-toothed warriors of Savage Island. Throughout, Horwitz also searches for Cook the man: a restless prodigy who fled his peasant boyhood, and later the luxury of Georgian London, for the privation and peril of sailing off the edge of the map. Read by Daniel Gerroll 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 Average Rating:
 Rating:  - Bad Day at Black RockIn 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 ... Read More Rating: - Cook'n with HorwitzAn 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, ... Read More Rating: - Another good readWhile 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. Rating:  - Engaging, if scatteredHorwitz'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. Rating: - 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 ... Read More Browse for similar items by category:
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