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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 wild 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.
Praise
"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."
—Bill Bryson, author of In a Sunburned Country
"Tony Horwitz's Blue Latitudes is one of the best. . . full of humor. . .
an elegant running account of Cook's exploits."
—The New York Times Book Review (cover review)
"Part history, part travelogue--and mostly just great fun. . . This is history on a global scale, and Horwitz tells it surpassingly well."
—Los Angeles Times
"A tour de force of evocative history, serious scholarship, and compelling writing."
—The Washington Post
"Part Cook biography, part travelogue, and very much a stroke of genius."
—The Philadelphia Inquirer
"Hilarious, brainy, and balanced. . . .A trip with Horwitz is as good as it gets."
—The Charlotte Observer
"Tony Horwitz has done it again. . . Keen insight, open-mindedness and
laugh-out-loud humor."
—San Francisco Chronicle
"A staggering blend of historical research, character study, sociological analysis,
and intriguing tales of travel."
—The Boston Globe
"Curiosity, intelligence, compassion and a sense of adventure. . . I love reading Tony Horwitz."
—Chicago Tribune
"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."
—The Seattle Time
Confederates in the Attic
When prize-winning war correspondent Tony Horwitz leaves the battlefields of Bosnia and the Middle East for a peaceful corner of the Blue Ridge Mountains, he thinks he's put war zones behind him. But awakened one morning by the crackle of musket fire, Horwitz starts filing front-line dispatches again this time from a war close to home, and to his own heart.
Propelled by his boyhood passion for the Civil War, Horwitz embarks on a search for places and people still held in thrall by America's greatest conflict. The result is an adventure into the soul of the unvanquished South, where the ghosts of the Lost Cause are resurrected through ritual and remembrance.
In Virginia, Horwitz joins a band of 'hardcore' reenactors who crash-diet to achieve the hollow-eyed look of starved Confederates; in Kentucky, he witnesses Klan rallies and calls for race war sparked by the killing of a white man who brandishes a rebel flag; at Andersonville, he finds that the prison's commander, executed as a war criminal, is now exalted as a martyr and hero; and in the book's climax, Horwitz takes a marathon trek from Antietam to Gettysburg to Appomattox in the company of Robert Lee Hodge, an eccentric pilgrim who dubs their odyssey the 'Civil Wargasm.'
Written with Horwitz's signature blend of humor, history, and hard-nosed journalism, Confederates in the Attic brings alive old battlefields and new ones 'classrooms, courts, country bars' where the past and the present collide, often in explosive ways. Poignant and picaresque, haunting and hilarious, it speaks to anyone who has ever felt drawn to the mythic South and to the dark romance of the Civil War.
Praise
"The freshest book about divisiveness in America that I have read in some time. This splendid commemoration of the war and its legacy . . . is an eyes-open, humorously no-nonsense survey of complicated Americans."
—Roy Blount Jr., New York Times Book Review
"In this sparkling book Horwitz explores some of our culture's myths with the irreverent glee of a small boy hurling snowballs at a beaver hat. . . . An important contribution to understanding how echoes of the Civil War have never stopped."
—USA Today
Horwitz's chronicle of his odyssey through the nether and ethereal worlds of Confederatemania is by turns amusing, chilling, poignant, and always fascinating. He has found the Lost Cause and lived to tell the tale a wonderfully piquant tale of hard-core reenactors, Scarlett O'Hara look-alikes, and people who reshape Civil War history to suit the way they wish it had come out. If you want to know why the war isn't over yet in the South, read Confederates in the Attic to find out.
—James McPherson, author of Battle Cry of Freedom
Baghdad Without A Map
This wild and comic tale of Middle East misadventure is "a very funny and frequently insightful look at the world's most combustible region. Fearlessness is a valuable quality in a travel writer, and Mr. Horwitz . . . seems as intrepid as they come."
—The New York Times Book Review.
Praise
"Horwitz's book better captures the point of view of the average person and covers more territory."
—Library Journal
"Horwitz's book better captures the point of view of the average person and covers more territory."
—Library Journal
One For The Road
"A high-spirited, comic ramble into the savage Outback populated by irreverent, beer-guzzling frontiersmen."
—Chicago Tribune
"A fascinating insight into what we're all about on the highways and byways along the outback track."
—The Telegraph (Sydney)
Swept off to live in Sydney by his Australian bride, American writer Tony Horwitz longs to explore the exotic reaches of his adopted land. So one day, armed only with a backpack and fantasies of the open road, he hitchhikes off into the awesome emptiness of Australia's outback.
What follows is a hilarious, hair-raising ride into the hot red center of a continent so desolate that civilization dwindles to a gas pump and a pub. While the outback's terrain is inhospitable, its scattered inhabitants are anything but. Horwitz entrusts himself to Aborigines, opal diggers, jackeroos, card sharks, and sunstruck wanderers who measure distance in the number of beers consumed en route. Along the way, Horwitz discovers that the outback is as treacherous as it is colorful. Bug-bitten, sunblasted, dust-choked, and bloodied by a near-fatal accident, Horwitz endures seven thousand miles of the world's most forbidding real estate, and some very bizarre personal encounters, as he winds his way to Queensland, Alice Springs, Perth, Darwin--and a hundred bush pubs in between.
Horwitz, the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of two national bestsellers, Confederates in the Attic and Baghdad Without a Map, is the ideal tour guide for anyone who has ever dreamed of a genuine Australian adventure.
Praise
"Lively, fast-paced and amusing . . . a consistently interesting and entertaining account."
—Kirkus Reviews
"Ironical, perceptive and subtle . . . will have readers getting out their maps and itching to follow Horwitz's tracks. . . . The internal journey is his finest achievement; he allows the reader into his heart, to go travelling with him there, sharing his adventures of the spirit."
—Sunday Times (London)
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