Gratuitous Llama Book Review

Blue Latitudes: Boldly Going Where Captain Cook Has Gone Before by Tony Horwitz.

As I had hoped when I first mentioned it, I was very pleased with this book, in which the author retraces Cook's three exploratory voyages across the Pacific, visiting the places where Cook made first contact, including New Zealand, Australia, the Aleutians, the Hawaiian Islands and various other parts of Polynesia, as well as visiting Cook's boyhood home in Yorkshire and his adult haunts on the Thames.

Horwitz obviously admires Cook for the magnitude of his scientific and maritime achievements. At the same time, he does not shy away from exploring Cook's weaknesses, including his apparent mental breakdown on the final voyage which led to his killing at the hands of Hawaiian natives on February 14, 1779.

Of course, one cannot write a book about contact between Western explorers and indigenous populations and their modern day fallout without getting tangled up in political debate. Here I think Horwitz does a very creditable, balanced job. He certainly is sympathetic to the conditions of the various people he talks to, many of whom live none too well, and he doesn't flinch in describing what happened to the locals once full-scale Western invasion began, but he politely refuses to buy into the more virulent mau-mauing and the tendency of his more radical interlocutors to paint Cook as an genocidal maniac. In a time when identity politics and White Guilt might cause an enthusiast of Cook to shy away from defending him, Horwitz holds a firm line. It is very refreshing, indeed.

I remember reading some very good reviews of Horwitz's Confederates In The Attic a few years ago, a book that attempts to explain the undying fascination with the Civil War, particularly among Southerners. As a Civil War buff myself, I'm thinking again about buying it. Anybody out there read this? Recommendations? Yes? No? Maybe?