BEST * 2024 BOOK : '' THE WIDE WIDE SEA ''

 

' The Wide Wide Sea ' By Hampton Sides. In this masterly history, Sides tracks the 18th-century English Naval officer James Cook's first and final voyage across the globe, painting a vivid and propulsive portrait that blends generations of scholarship with firsthand accounts of Europeans seafarers as well as the oral traditions of Indigenous Pacific Islanders.

The story begins in Britain as the last embers of the Enlightenment are going out, a time when curiosity and empathy gave way to imperial ambition and moral zeal.

Between tales of adventure on the open ocean, complex depictions of Polynesian culture and colorful scenes of subarctic frost littered with animal life, Sides expertly probes the causes of Cook's growing anger and violence as the journey wears on and the explorer reckons with the fallout of what he and others had wrought in expanding the map of Europe's power.

The World Students Society thanks The New York Times.