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COOK

Name: COOK
Author: Nicholas Thomas
ISBN: 0-8027-1412-9

THE EXTRAORDINARY VOYAGES OF CAPTAIN JAMES COOK

by Nicholas Thomas ‧ RELEASE DATE: Nov. 1, 2003

All in all, a well-paced, nuanced contribution to the history of exploration.

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A richly detailed life of perhaps the greatest maritime explorer in history.

A partial life, that is: Thomas (Anthropology/Univ. of London; Colonialism’s Culture, not reviewed) shuns the “grandfather to grave” course of most biographies, beginning his study of the Yorkshire-born James Cook as he neared 40. By 1767, Cook was already an accomplished sailor and leader, driven by a keen desire to put points and lines on maps where none had existed before. As a surveyor, Thomas shows, Cook was nearly without peer, and his sea and coastal charts “produced a new kind of accurate knowledge that suddenly showed up his predecessors’ efforts for their amateurishness.” As Cook voyaged ever farther from England, now aboard the Endeavour, he added ethnographic skills to his quiver, thanks in some measure to the influence of his shipmate Joseph Banks; Thomas considers both to have been “embodiments of Enlightenment inquiry,” and both took care to record cultural, geographical, and natural-historical details in their journals and logs, even if they sometimes failed to record incidents that did not reflect well on the captain. We can only guess at those incidents, but some must have involved the deaths of native peoples. Though Cook had taken an interest in and even praised the lifeways of some of the indigenous peoples he encountered, he apparently had no qualms about raising his pistol; as Thomas notes, commenting on an account by a contemporary writer, “Cook’s excuse was, in effect, that you had to be there to see why this occurred . . . which was to beg the questions of whether civilized men were only civilized in civilized places, and whether their travels took them into situations beyond the scope of ethical and moral principles that were surely supposed to apply universally.” Thomas does well to sound that heart-of-darkness theme, which turns up at points throughout his narrative as Cook becomes ever gloomier about the enterprise of command and ever quicker to assert European, and his own, authority—behavior that surely contributed to his death at the hands of unimpressed Hawaiians in 1779.

All in all, a well-paced, nuanced contribution to the history of exploration.

Pub Date: Nov. 1, 2003

ISBN: 0-8027-1412-9

Page Count: 512

Publisher: Walker

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2003

Categories:

BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | SURVIVORS & ADVENTURERS | GENERAL HISTORY | GENERAL BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR

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THE PURSUIT OF HAPPYNESS

FROM MEAN STREETS TO WALL STREET

by Chris Gardner with Quincy Troupe ‧ RELEASE DATE: June 1, 2006

Well-told and admonitory.

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Young-rags-to-mature-riches memoir by broker and motivational speaker Gardner.

Born and raised in the Milwaukee ghetto, the author pulled himself up from considerable disadvantage. He was fatherless, and his adored mother wasn’t always around; once, as a child, he spied her at a family funeral accompanied by a prison guard. When beautiful, evanescent Moms was there, Chris also had to deal with Freddie “I ain’t your goddamn daddy!” Triplett, one of the meanest stepfathers in recent literature. Chris did “the dozens” with the homies, boosted a bit and in the course of youthful adventure was raped. His heroes were Miles Davis, James Brown and Muhammad Ali. Meanwhile, at the behest of Moms, he developed a fondness for reading. He joined the Navy and became a medic (preparing badass Marines for proctology), and a proficient lab technician. Moving up in San Francisco, married and then divorced, he sold medical supplies. He was recruited as a trainee at Dean Witter just around the time he became a homeless single father. All his belongings in a shopping cart, Gardner sometimes slept with his young son at the office (apparently undiscovered by the night cleaning crew). The two also frequently bedded down in a public restroom. After Gardner’s talents were finally appreciated by the firm of Bear Stearns, his American Dream became real. He got the cool duds, hot car and fine ladies so coveted from afar back in the day. He even had a meeting with Nelson Mandela. Through it all, he remained a prideful parent. His own no-daddy blues are gone now.

Well-told and admonitory.

Pub Date: June 1, 2006

ISBN: 0-06-074486-3

Page Count: 320

Publisher: Amistad/HarperCollins

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2006

Categories:

GENERAL BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | BUSINESS

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INTO THE WILD

by Jon Krakauer ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 1, 1996

A wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor...

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The excruciating story of a young man on a quest for knowledge and experience, a search that eventually cooked his goose, told with the flair of a seasoned investigative reporter by Outside magazine contributing editor Krakauer (Eiger Dreams, 1990).

Chris McCandless loved the road, the unadorned life, the Tolstoyan call to asceticism. After graduating college, he took off on another of his long destinationless journeys, this time cutting all contact with his family and changing his name to Alex Supertramp. He was a gent of strong opinions, and he shared them with those he met: "You must lose your inclination for monotonous security and adopt a helter-skelter style of life''; "be nomadic.'' Ultimately, in 1992, his terms got him into mortal trouble when he ran up against something—the Alaskan wild—that didn't give a hoot about Supertramp's worldview; his decomposed corpse was found 16 weeks after he entered the bush. Many people felt McCandless was just a hubris-laden jerk with a death wish (he had discarded his map before going into the wild and brought no food but a bag of rice). Krakauer thought not. Admitting an interest that bordered on obsession, he dug deep into McCandless's life. He found a willful, reckless, moody boyhood; an ugly little secret that sundered the relationship between father and son; a moral absolutism that agitated the young man's soul and drove him to extremes; but he was no more a nutcase than other pilgrims. Writing in supple, electric prose, Krakauer tries to make sense of McCandless (while scrupulously avoiding off-the-rack psychoanalysis): his risky behavior and the rites associated with it, his asceticism, his love of wide open spaces, the flights of his soul.

A wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor will it to readers of Krakauer's narrative. (4 maps) (First printing of 35,000; author tour)