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
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”
The powerful story of a father’s past and a son’s future.
Atlantic senior writer Coates (The Beautiful Struggle: A Father, Two Sons, and an Unlikely Road to Manhood, 2008) offers this eloquent memoir as a letter to his teenage son, bearing witness to his own experiences and conveying passionate hopes for his son’s life. “I am wounded,” he writes. “I am marked by old codes, which shielded me in one world and then chained me in the next.” Coates grew up in the tough neighborhood of West Baltimore, beaten into obedience by his father. “I was a capable boy, intelligent and well-liked,” he remembers, “but powerfully afraid.” His life changed dramatically at Howard University, where his father taught and from which several siblings graduated. Howard, he writes, “had always been one of the most critical gathering posts for black people.” He calls it The Mecca, and its faculty and his fellow students expanded his horizons, helping him to understand “that the black world was its own thing, more than a photo-negative of the people who believe they are white.” Coates refers repeatedly to whites’ insistence on their exclusive racial identity; he realizes now “that nothing so essentialist as race” divides people, but rather “the actual injury done by people intent on naming us, intent on believing that what they have named matters more than anything we could ever actually do.” After he married, the author’s world widened again in New York, and later in Paris, where he finally felt extricated from white America’s exploitative, consumerist dreams. He came to understand that “race” does not fully explain “the breach between the world and me,” yet race exerts a crucial force, and young blacks like his son are vulnerable and endangered by “majoritarian bandits.” Coates desperately wants his son to be able to live “apart from fear—even apart from me.”
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”Pub Date: July 8, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-8129-9354-7
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Spiegel & Grau
Review Posted Online: May 5, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2015
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
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
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