Blue Latitudes: Boldly Going Where Captain Cook Has Gone Before
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- ISBN13: 9780312422608
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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 leader 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 makes a brilliant portrait of Cook: an on the breadline 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 make the global village we inhabit today.Amazon.com Review
Captain James Cook’s three epic 18th-century explorations of the Pacific Ocean were the last of their kind, factually 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 pure 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 arresting dichotomies abound throughout that journey–Maori toughs who adopt Nazi imagery to symbolize their own fight against white domination, millennia-ancient Polynesian sexual mores that would bring shame on 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 past riddles are elusive at best–and seldom as compelling as the heap new questions they pose. –Jerry McCulley
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Anyone who’s travelled to at least one Captain Cook spot will delight in this book. P.S. Mick Jagger said on THE CHARLIE ROSE SHOW that “Blue Latitudes” is the book he is reading at the moment.
Reader’s Rating: 5 / 5
A worthy book, but slow in many places, and regularly reading like a rehash of Martin Dugard’s “Farther Than Any Man.”
Reader’s Rating: 3 / 5
I chose to read Blue Latitudes after reading a review from an Amazon “Rate It” client. It suggested that Blue Latitude was a far more superior book than Over the Edge of the World. Since I thought OVTEOTW was one of the best books I ever read, I’ll give BL a read;the longest chore I had to suffer this year.
Spare yourself!
Reader’s Rating: 1 / 5
Sorry to say this, I was looking forwards to a wonderful read. As a replacement for I establish a terribly formed narrative, loose ends, terrible writing, a dire lack of wit and style. This guy can make any place look dull and dumpy. He doesn’t give any insight into Cook or the South Pacific and ultimately the book reads like an early chronicle. Also Horowitz needs to learn what a reader wants to see all ears on. We don’t need a three page diary of his acquaintances drinking bender. His original week on a ship from Seattle is never brought up again, nor is what he learned applicable (in his mind it seems) to the either the additional boat trips he took or the ship captained by Cook. If he had a rollicking tale we might forgive him (as we do Grisham) but as a replacement for this is dull plodding, a sea of despondency. Had he submitted this to New Yorker, it would have been rejected, and if not rejected edited considerably. It needs it. I had to tap into a Cookian mania for finishing a project just to get through it. Don’t bother.
Reader’s Rating: 1 / 5
Horwitz must be complimented for undertaking visits to so many different places around the world, and for his admirable depth of research. What makes this book appealing is this research is the combination of traditional literary-style past research and Horwitz’s personal experiences during his contemporary visits. He speaks with locals in places as diverse as Cook Town, Australia, Unalaska in the Aleution islands, and Niue, a dot on the map of the pacific between Tahiti and Tonga. These contemporary local perspectives mesh with traditional past studies on Cook’s explorations to provide an enlightening perspective on the effect of Cook’s explorations.
Sorry to say, this also makes Horwitz’s account to some extent jaded. He makes places universally viewed as paradise sound like trash dumps. Tahiti, for example, comes across like some forlorn third-world country. This book reminded me of why I quit reading National Geographic: while I loved reading about distant, exotic places, I got tired of constantly reading about how they were on the brink of ruin thanks to the relentless attack of humanity. I’ve seen recent pictures of Tahiti, and it doesn’t look that terrible. It does seem vital to know that white man brought venereal and additional diseases, pollution, and near-eradication and total subjugation of indigenous cultures. I’m just not sure what to do with that information.
The book is probably 3/5s travelogue and 2/5s history. People who delight in reading either will benefit from this book. Just don’t be surprised if, when you’re done, you’re not interested in visiting any of the places yourself.
Reader’s Rating: 3 / 5