Cook : The Extraordinary Voyages of Captain James Cook
by Nicholas Thomas
from Walker & Company
Cook is not, however, viewed by all as a heroic figure. Some Hawaiians demonize him as a syphilitic rascist who had a catastrophic effect on local health. Indigenous Australians often see him as the violent dispossessor of their lands. Nicholas Thomas explores Cook's contradictory character as never before, by reconstructing the many sides of encounters that were curious and unusual for Europeans and natives alike. The result of twenty years' research, Thomas's magnificently rich portrait overturns the familiar images of Cook and reveals the fascinating and far more ambiguous figure beneath.
The Journals of Captain Cook (Penguin Classics)
by James R. Cook
from Penguin Classics
A new one-volume abridged edition of Cook's famous journals--"a majestic story of epic proportions"(Philip Edwards in the Introduction)
Captain Cook's Journals provide his vivid first-hand account of three extraordinary expeditions between 1768 and 1779. These charted the entire coast of New Zealand and the east coast of Australia and brought back detailed descriptions of Tahiti, Tonga, and a host of previously unknown islands in the Pacific including the Hawaiian Islands. The journals amply reveal the determination, courage, and skill that enabled Cook to wrestle with the continuous dangers of uncharted seas and the problems of achieving a relationship with the peoples whose unannounced guest he became. This edition, abridged from the definitive four-volume Hakluyt Society edition, makes Cook's inimitable personal account of his years of voyaging widely accessible for the first time and includes an Introduction to each voyage, a Glossary of unusual words, indexes of people and places, and a Postscript assessing the controversy surrounding Cook's death.
Selected and Edited with Introductions by Philip Edwards
Captain James Cook: A Biography
by Richard Hough
from W. W. Norton & Company
This meticulous narrative captures an age of discovery and establishes Cook as a link between the vague scientific speculations of the 18th century and the industrial revolution to come. Includes an interesting new element is medical evidence that may explain Cook's strange behavior on his final voyage.
Blue Latitudes: Boldly Going Where Captain Cook Has Gone Before
by Tony Horwitz
from Henry Holt and Co.
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
Captain James Cook's three epic journeys in the 18th century were the last great voyages of discovery. His ships sailed 150,000 miles, from the Artic to the Antarctic, from Tasmania to Oregon, from Easter Island to Siberia. When Cook set off for the Pacific in 1768, a third of the globe remained blank. By the time he died in Hawaii in 1779, the map of the world was substantially complete.
Tony Horwitz vividly recounts Cook's voyages and the exotic scenes the captain encountered: tropical orgies, taboo rituals, cannibal feasts, human sacrifice. He also relives Cook's adventures by following in the captain's wake to places such as Tahiti, Savage Island, and the Great Barrier Reef to discover Cook's embattled legacy in the present day. Signing on as a working crewman aboard a replica of Cook's vessel, Horwitz experiences the thrill and terror of sailing a tall ship. He also explores Cook the man: an impoverished farmboy who broke through the barriers of his class and time to become the greatest navigator in British history.
By turns harrowing and hilarious, insightful and entertaining, BLUE LATITUDES brings to life a man whose voyages helped create the 'global village' we know today.
The Trial of the Cannibal Dog: The Remarkable Story of Captain Cook's Encounters in the South Seas
by Anne Salmond
from Yale University Press
The Life of Captain James Cook
by J. Beaglehole
from Stanford University Press
An Uncommon Soldier: The Civil War Letters of Sarah Rosetta Wakeman, alia Pvt. Lyons Wakeman, 153rd Regiment, New York State Volunteers, 1862-1864
by Sarah Rosetta Wakeman
from Oxford University Press, USA
"I don't know how long before i shall have to go into the field of battle. For my part i don't care. I don't feel afraid to go. I don't believe there are any Rebel's bullet made for me yet."
--Pvt. Lyons Wakeman
Similar sentiments were expressed by tens of thousands of Civil War soldiers in their diaries and in their letters to loved ones at home. What transforms the letters of Pvt. Lyons Wakeman from merely interesting reading into a unique and fascinating addition to Civil War literature is who wrote them--for Private Wakeman was not what "he" seemed to be. The five-foot tall soldier's true identity was that of a simple young farm girl from central New York state named Sarah Rosetta Wakeman. Her letters, the only such correspondence known to exist, provide a rare glimpse of what life was like for a woman fighting as a common soldier in the Civil War under the guise of a man.
Written shortly after she left home to pursue her fortune in 1862, Rosetta's letters over the next two years tell of army life in the defences of Washington, D.C. and on the march and in battle during the 1864 Louisiana Red River Campaign. She wrote frequently to her family in Afton, NY, and her letters contain feelings and observations like those expressed by the majority of her fellow soldiers. We read of her determination to perform honorably the duty required of a soldier, the trials of hard marching and combat, her pride in being able to "drill just as well as any man" in her regiment, and her eventual fatalistic attitude toward military service, and her frequent expressions of faith in God and the afterlife. Although Rosetta did not survive the war, her letters remain as an singular record of female military life in the ranks, a phenomenon largely ignored by historians and researchers.
Private Wakeman was not alone in embarking on her strange adventure. Hundreds of women, from both the North and South, disguised themselves as men and enlisted in the armies of our nation's bloodiest war.
The experiences of these women during the Civil War are just beginning to be recognized as elemental to understanding the life of this country during those turbulent times. Little is known about these women precisely because they enlisted and served in constant secrecy, fearful of revealing their true identities. This unique collection of letters offers a firsthand look at the personality and character of a woman who defied convention to take a man's place in the Union army.
The Solace of Food: A Life of James Beard
by Robert Clark
from Steerforth
IN THE BEGINNING there was Beard," said Julia Child, and perhaps no other individual played such a central role in America’s postwar fascination with food and cooking. James Beard took American food seriously at a time when French cuisine was revered above all others, and his ebullient personality, genuine culinary talents, and assiduous self-promotion (he once called himself "the world’s greatest gastronomic whore") transformed the struggling actor from Oregon into a world-renowned authority on cooking and eating. First published as James Beard, a Biography (HarperCollins, 1993), this award-winning book was chosen as a "Notable Book of the Year" by the New York Times Book Review and called one of the best food books of the year by Julia Child on "Good Morning America." The Solace of Food is both the definitive biography of Beard and a fascinating history of food. Clark writes candidly about the "feuds and bitchery, betrayal and revenge" inside the food world and about Beard’s homosexuality in a closeted period. "Clark has given us a vivid portrait of a sometimes bizarre but ultimately fascinating man of our times," said the Times, "but his real achievement is having produced a valuable and thoroughly engrossing work of contemporary cultural history."
Farther Than Any Man: The Rise and Fall of Captain James Cook
by Martin Dugard
from Washington Square Press
In the annals of seafaring and exploration, there is one name that immediately evokes visions of the open ocean, billowing sails, visiting strange, exotic lands previously uncharted, and civilizations never before encountered -- Captain James Cook.
This is the true story of a legendary man and explorer. Noted modern-day adventurer Martin Dugard, using James Cook's personal journals, strips away the myths surrounding Cook's life and portrays his tremendous ambition, intellect, and sheer hardheadedness to rise through the ranks of the Royal Navy -- and by his courageous exploits become one of the most enduring figures in naval history.
Full or realistic action, lush descriptions of places and events, and fascinating historical characters such as King George III and the soon-to-be-notorious Master William Bligh, Dugard's gripping account of the life and death of Captain James Cook is a thrilling story of a discoverer hell-bent on going farther than any man.
The Apotheosis of Captain Cook: European Mythmaking in the Pacific
by Gananath Obeyesekere
from Princeton University Press
According to many standard histories of the Pacific, when Captain James Cook landed on the island of Hawaii on January 17, 1779, he was received by the natives as an avatar of the god Lono and feted accordingly. In The Apotheosis of Captain Cook Sri Lankan scholar Gananath Obeyesekere questions this "fact" of history, arguing that it was the Europeans, and not the natives, who found a need to establish their colonization of new worlds on the notion of deities come home. Cook himself, Obeyesekere adds sympathetically, was a man caught between social classes, treated as an equal by Polynesian kings but shunned by members of the English nobility because of his lower-class background; he was a good man, but a god only in the imaginations of his compatriots. Obeyesekere devotes much of The Apotheosis of Captain Cook to arguing spiritedly with anthropologist Marshall Sahlins over matters of Hawaiian history.
Here Gananath Obeyesekere debunks one of the most enduring myths of imperialism, civilization, and conquest: the notion that the Western civilizer is a god to savages. Using shipboard journals and logs kept by Captain James Cook and his officers, Obeyesekere reveals the captain as both the self-conscious civilizer and as the person who, his mission gone awry, becomes a "savage" himself.
In this new edition of The Apotheosis of Captain Cook, the author addresses, in a lengthy afterword, Marshall Sahlins's 1994 book, How "Natives" Think, which was a direct response to this work.
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