We are pleased to offer the opportunity to purchase books by
Waterford residents Tony Horwitz and Geraldine
Brooks at great prices in association with Amazon.com.
Blue Latitudes
Book Description
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.
