BY TONY HORWITZ
BLUE LATITUDES
BOLDLY GOING WHERE CAPTAIN COOK HAS GONE BEFORE
Two centuries after James Cook’s epic voyages of discovery, Tony Horwitz takes readers on a 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.
“Thoroughly enjoyable. No writer has better captured the heroic enigma that was Captain James Cook than Tony Horwitz in this amiable and enthralling excursion around the Pacific.”a
“Horwitz succeeds brilliantly in turning the English from stiff icons to flesh-and-blood human beings. The book’s constant humor, honesty and judgment recall his own Confederates in the Attic and Bill Bryson’s A Walk in the Woods…This book will keep you enthralled.”
“Tony Horwitz’s Blue Latitudes is one of the best…full of humor…an elegant running account of Cook’s exploits.”
“Part history, part travelogue—and mostly just great fun…This is history on a global scale, and Horwitz tells it surpassingly well.”
“A tour de force of evocative history, serious scholarship, and compelling writing.”
“Part Cook biography, part travelogue, and very much a stroke of genius.”