A vivid and well-documented account of the life and voyages of the famous 18th-century English navigator. James Cook discovered and charted coastlines from the Arctic to the Antarctic, from the east of Australia to Alaska, and hundreds of islands in between. Here Hough (Edward and Alexandra, 1993, etc.) tells the story of this remarkable man, the son of a land laborer, who managed to rise through the ranks of the Royal Navy to become a member of the Royal Society (the oldest scientific society in Great Britain) and one of the most celebrated men of his time. Hough concentrates on the three lengthy Pacific voyages that occupied the last 11 years of Cook's life before his death at the hands of Hawaiian cannibals in 1779 at the age of 51. His first great voyage involved an expedition to Tahiti in order to measure planetary distances by parallax observations of the passage of Venus across the sun that took place in 1769. He was then commissioned to claim for Britain the Great Southern Continent (which he proved did not exist) and West Holland (Australia), and charged with opening the much-sought-after Northwest Passage. Hough's narrative is based on his extensive reading of the copious logs and scientific records made by Cook himself and the astronomers and botanists who sailed with him. We learn of Cook's sure instinct for governing his men, how he imposed a vitamin C regimen, which virtually eliminated scurvy, and of his unusual gentleness and understanding in his dealings with Polynesian and Maori natives who had never before seen a European. Hough has a keen eye for the pathos and absurdity of human nature, which enhances descriptions both of the high and mighty with whom Cook had to contend in England and of the natives whom he encountered in his amazing journeys. A rich taste of 18th-century life and its spirit of scientific and human daring.
Pub Date: March 1, 1995
ISBN: 0-393-03680-4
Page Count: 500
Publisher: Norton
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1995
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...
Elie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children.
He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions.
Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2006
ISBN: 0374500010
Page Count: 120
Publisher: Hill & Wang
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006
A wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor...
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.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1996
ISBN: 0-679-42850-X
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Villard
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1995
SEEN & HEARD
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