Retracing the journeys of Captain James Cook, author Tony Horwitz writes a fast-paced, fascinating, and often very humorous account of his “walk” in the footsteps of Captain Cook, an explorer he obviously admires and whom he attempts to understand and make understandable to his readers. Fascinating as a biography of the complex Captain Cook, as a lively record of the age of exploration, as a modern adventure to “romantic” south Pacific islands, and as research on cultural anthropology, this is an exhilarating and fast-paced narrative, one which will reward careful reading and cause the reader to examine the dubious results of “civilization.” Horwitz obviously enjoyed his research, and the reader will, too, however vicariously.
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Written in 1978, this is a murder mystery set near the South Pole in 1909, the same year as Shackleton’s first expedition and five years before the Endurance epic. A similar crew of explorer-scientists and sailors, with the same attitudes and prejudices that one finds in the literary record of the Endurance, perform similar tasks under similar conditions, with one big exception. Captain Eugene Stewart (sharing initials with Ernest Shackleton) must also investigate his own crew as he attempts to unmask the murderer of Victor Henneker, the expedition’s representative of the press, who intends to record the voyage for posterity. With the same care for historic details and period attitudes which one sees in some of Keneally’s later, prize-winning books, such as Confederates and Schindler’s List, Keneally reveals Henneker to be a blackmailer who holds damaging information about almost everyone in the crew.
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Two-time Booker Prize winner Peter Carey, one of Australia’s most honored contemporary writers, creates his most dazzling novel yet with this send-up of the art world, filled with satire about dealers, auction houses, compulsive collectors, forgers, conservators and technicians, art researchers, catalogue writers, those who crate and ship paintings, and even the artists themselves. At the same time, he creates two splendid characters through whose limited vision this world is viewed—Michael “Butcher” Boone, a successful avant-garde artist from Australia, now experiencing hard times, and his “slow” brother Hugh, a 220-pound giant with little control over his emotions and a penchant for breaking the little fingers of people who get in his way. The story of how Butcher is drawn into a complex scheme to defraud is told in alternating chapters by Butcher himself and by Hugh, who sees himself as his brother’s “helper.” The action ratchets up as the financial stakes in the art market increase, and a murder, filled with shocking details, draws the complexity of the art fraud into the open for the reader—and for Butcher. The final chapter, almost an Afterword, gives new meaning to the word “irony.” (On my Favorites List for 2006)
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In simple language that sometimes takes on the cadences of the psalms, the soaring intensity of opera, and the beautifully repeated phrases of canons, author Veza Canetti tells the semi-autobiographical story of an artistic couple trapped just outside Vienna at the time of Kristallnacht, November, 1938, a terror she and her husband had also endured. The Canettis managed to escape from Austria just ten days after Kristallnacht, and immediately upon their arrival in England, Veza Canetti began to write this book. Using fictional characters, she fills the narrative with vibrant details from her own recent experiences, completing the “novel” in the spring of 1939. Though this novel was scheduled for publication in 1939, Britain’s entry into the war prevented this, and it remained among Canetti’s papers after her death in 1963. Prepared for publication and released for the first time in 2001, sixty-two years after it was written, it has finally been released in paperback. (On my Favorites List for 2007)
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In this novel within a novel, Australian author Thomas Keneally returns to the political themes which won him prizes for The Chant of Jimmie Blacksmith, Voices from the Forest, and Schindler’s Ark. Keneally has always been at his best depicting ordinary people facing extraordinary pressures, especially from governments bent on totalitarian rule, and this contemporary allegory is no exception. Taking place in an unnamed oil-rich country in the Middle East ruled by a tyrant who calls himself Great Uncle, the novel centers on a man calling himself “Alan Sheriff,” a short story writer given one month to write an “autobiographical novel” for which Great Uncle will take full credit. Sheriff, we learn in the opening chapter, is telling his story to a western journalist from a detention camp in an unnamed desert country, where he has languished for three years.
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