FArTHER

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James Cook never laid eyes on the sea until he was in his teens. He then began an extraordinary rise from farmboy to the hallowed rank of captain of the Royal Navy, leading three historic journeys that would forever link his name with fearless exploration.

Jonathan Franzen's Freedom was the runaway most-discussed novel of 2010, an ambitious and searching engagement with life in America in the twenty-first century. In The New York Times Book Review, Sam Tanenhaus proclaimed it "a masterpiece of American fiction" and lauded its illumination, "through the steady radiance of its author's profound moral intelligence, [of] the world we thought we knew." Farther Than Any Man' begins with an introduction. The author reflects on the legacy of Captain James Cook while walking through Newport, RI. Just off the coast of Newport, you see, buried under the silt just a few hundred yards from the Naval War College, lies Cook's first ship, HMS ENDEAVOUR. Scuttled there during the American Revolution while Cook was commanding another vessel on the other side of the world, ENDEAVOUR still lies, silently, linking us to our past. From Leon and the Place Between, illustrated by Grahame Baker-Smith, shortlisted for the Kate Greenaway medal 2010 Martin Dugard is the New York Times #1 bestselling author of the Taking Series — including Taking Berlin (2022) and Taking Paris (2021).

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These often thought-provoking stories look at the reactions ordinary people have to the unusual situations they find themselves in and feature a host of different illustrative styles ranging from collage to painterly Edward Hopper-esque scenes. Title piece “Farther Away” documents Franzen’s pilgrimage to Alejandro Selkirk Island (where the real-life Robinson Crusoe was stranded) to experience solitude, find some rare birds, and scatter his friend David Foster Wallace’s ashes. Franzen believes Wallace was right to posit “fiction is a solution, the best solution, to the problem of existential solitude. Fiction was his way off the island.” Obviously, his life is more complicated than that. Martin Dugard does a great job using Cook's own journals, and other historic documents. Knowing that the 1770s was during the American Revolution, and technology was very primitive, I am impressed with the art of navigating by moon and stars. Cook himself was quite complicated too. He had a drive to discover all that was possible, to the point of abusing his crew to make them cooperate and share his vision and passion. He became obsessed with the power of discovery, and thus his ending was brutal. His personal life was fraught with troubles too, considering medical advances were also far in the future. His lovely wife Elizabeth was faithful, as was James Cook, despite being separated for years at a time. Several of their children died in infancy. To deserve the death sentence he’d passed on himself, the execution of the sentence had to be deeply injurious to someone. To prove once and for all that he truly didn’t deserve to be loved, it was necessary to betray as hideously as possible those who loved him best, by killing himself at home and making them firsthand witnesses to his act." Certainly there appears to have been a tendency to extract far more from the indigenous populations than that which was offered. Sad but true a likely scenario played out in many other cultural encounters on history.

In "I Just Called to Say I Love You," Franzen beautifully captured the societal damage being caused by cellphones. He also draws the issue close to home, describing how his relationship with his late parents may have coloured his view of cellphones. David wrote about weather as well as anyone who ever put words on paper, and he loved his dogs more purely than he loved anything or anyone else, but nature itself didn't interest him, and he was utterly indifferent to birds. Once, when we were driving near Stinson Beach, in California, I'd stopped to give him a telescope view of a long-billed curlew, a species whose magnificence is to my mind self-evident and revelatory. He looked through the scope for two seconds before turning away with patent boredom. "Yeah," he said with his particular tone of hollow politeness, "it's pretty." In the summer before he died, sitting with him on his patio while he smoked cigarettes, I couldn't keep my eyes off the hummingbirds around his house and was saddened that he could, and while he was taking his heavily medicated afternoon naps I was learning the birds of Ecuador for an upcoming trip, and I understood the difference between his unmanageable misery and my manageable discontents to be that I could escape myself in the joy of birds and he could not." (pp. 37-38)

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Started listening to it on a long camping drive with my hubby. But we didn’t finish it. When a month later we made it to Hawaii for a vacation and seen a town named Captain Cook, we decided to finish the book together. Then there's love. Wallace, apparently, didn't know what love is, just like that singer from Foreigner:

I don't typically find reading challenging in this way, which sums up Franzen's brilliance. While his topics vary to the point of mania, sharp intellect, and what I can only describe as earnest expression are a common factor amongst Franzen's essays. I used to feel bad for Franzen because he was forever going to be known as DFW's less-talented friend but now I think I feel bad because he's so obsessed with birds?? In James Cook geval is hij de grote ontdekker van wat er niet was (terra incognita) sinds hij op zoek was naar het zuidelijke continent wat uiteindelijk niet bestond. Antarctica bleek heel klein en hij voer er rondom heen, en Nieuw Zeeland en Australie waren deels al ontdekt (Abel Tasman) en zelfs Tahiti waar Cook’s naam bijna synoniem mee is was al door een Fransman ontdekt. Paaseiland was ook al een keer bezocht (Roggeveen). Op zijn derde reis ontdekte hij hij wel de Hawai eilanden waar hij bij een tweede bezoek spijtig ook gedood werd door de lokale bevolking. Spelling Seeds have been designed to complement Writing Roots by providing weekly, contextualised sequences of sessions for the teaching of spelling that include open-ended investigations and opportunities to practise and apply within meaningful and purposeful contexts, linked (where relevant) to other areas of the curriculum and a suggestion of how to extend the investigation into home learning. Buy from our bookstore and 25% of the cover price will be given to a school of your choice to buy more books. *15% of eBooks. Home >It must have been hard for Cook. I know how I am. I'll take the admiration without the effort. The minute I actually have to earn admiration from someone, then I feel it's over. You should admire me *more* because of my effort. My ego is unbearable. Cook wanted to be a legend. He wanted to be in the history books. Yet his third voyage at the height of his fame was disastrous. Here is a man with all the pressure hanging over his head thinking he's returning to greatness while the world itself has been in constant change. There's a moment where, after resorting to brutality finally, he is invited to a grand feast. It was actually a plot to kill him and his men which didn't pan out. He was oblivious to the danger.