FArTHER

Product Information

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. However, as a whole this book is an excellent introduction to Cook and his quirky rise from farmer to sailor to navy officer, and his almost OCD level drive to discover literally ever land in the Pacific... and then every land in the Arctic as well. Ironically, his main quest throughout two voyages was to find Antarctica, and he never actually set foot on the continent, nor fully believed it ever existed. It’s sad to see the idealistic, professional, ambitious, and adventurous Cook of the first voyage degenerate into the sloppy and unpleasantly cruel Cook of the third, the one whose arrogance got him killed. The transformation of Cook’s character that led to his death gives this book a touch of Greek tragedy, and turns it into a morality tale proving the point that power corrupts.

Just like any metaphor, what the sentence really mean can only be left to interpretation. For me, it resonated with all the happy memories that I have in the past, and the grieve of having them lost to time. A lot of us strive to recreate the intense positive experiences or missed opportunities we had in the past despite our perfect understanding that things have changed. Don't we all have that something we always wanted as a kid, that we now still carry a weird affection towards? Later he adds “I do here admit the possibility that, compared with everyone else on the airport concourse, I am an extraordinarily cold and unloving person.” Um, yeah, maybe. He’s worried that the too-frequent habitual repetition empties the phrase of its meaning. Perhaps less than habitual repetition empties the phrase of its relevance. Perhaps Franzen just takes the phrase "I love you" too seriously, if its utterance ought to be reserved for sacred, intimate moments, rather than casually tossed off. A kitschy gift provokes a cautionary tale on sustainability and emerging economies in “The Chinese Puffin.” “Authentic but Horrible” condemns the Broadway musical adaptation of Spring Awakening while getting to the core of Frank Wedekind’s subversive play. A brief bid is made for the canonization of Canadian short-story master Alice Munro in “What Makes You So Sure You’re Not the Evil One Yourself?” The title essay finds the author on a remote Pacific island confronting, at long last, the death of Wallace. That said, 'Farther Than Any Man' was difficult to listen to. Cook's life was not an easy one, and his biography is not the story of one triumph flowing into the next. Worst of all, even in triumph, the reader knows that Cook will wind up dismembered on a Hawaiian beach. That fate is always there, always waiting.Some essays left me scratching my head. For instance, the essay about how he finds it “oppressive and grating” when people end cell phone conversations in public spaces by saying “I love you.”

A very enjoyable book that maintains good velocity from beginning to end. I was inspired to read this book by the vandalism that has recently been infected upon statues of Cook here in Canada as the country wrestles with the sad news of many unmarked Graves being discovered at the grounds of former residential schools.For instance, I was living in Seattle when his novel Freedom came out, and Time magazine put Franzen on the cover. Seattle’s weekly magazine, The Stranger, didn't like that. It ran a parody cover at Franzen's expense, and in its review section called Freedom a bloated pretentious turd (more or less). Then there was the whole Oprah debacle, which branded Franzen as an ingrate. So we beat on" could imply a lot of things, but when you add in the next phrase, "boats against the current", it implies they are rowing, their paddles beating against the waves, trying to row upstream or against the tide. More completely, "So we on" means that they have been doing this thing, they do not want to do this thing, but despite of or because of whatever was explained before this sentence, they continue to do so anyway.

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) Oh I forgot there are also some hilariously crotchety thoughts in here about technology, like literally he is mad when people end cell phone conversations with "Love you!" The self I felt myself to be that day was a self I recognized only because I’d longed for it for so long. I met, in myself, on my first day in New York City, the person I wanted to become." Rarely, if ever, have I read a history book as compelling and as human as 'Farther Than Any Man: The Rise and Fall of Captain James Cook'. This is a picture book for children of ages 8 and upwards. Although it doesn’t contain a lot of text, the words are beautifully woven into the pictures using different fonts and text sizes. The pictures themselves are intricate and detailed images put together in a unique way using photographs and illustration which in themselves tell a story. I found myself asking questions about the images and even making up a little more of the story in my head.

LoveReading4Kids Says

He (Wallace) was loveable the way a child is lovable, and he was capable of returning love with a childlike purity. If love is nevertheless excluded from his work, it's because he never quite felt that he deserved to receive it. He was a lifelong prisoner on the island of himself..." (p. 40) Dal punto di vista politico e letterario Franzen è dichiaratamente e radicalmente democratico, e la sua poetica raappresenta molto bene quest'aspetto. Lizbeth got arrested on her second trip to Greece the following year due to legal complications. In a horrible turn of events, on May 20, 1996, the Greek courts reversed their previous judgment and temporarily granted the girls’ custody to Grigorios. Lizbeth discovered that he had filed a petition to prove her an unsuitable mother and hence the decision changed. Later, after a lot of push and pull with the government officials and legal bodies and with some support from authorities, Lizbeth finally gained rightful custody of Meredith and Marianthi. I particularly enjoyed Franzen's rants on literary interviews, then grammar (read it to get the in joke). Whatever the topic Franzen writes with enjoyable fluid prose that prevented me from putting the book down (OK figure of speech, closing the kindle on my laptop)

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?? This three-week Writing Root begins by introducing the concept of dreams and how important they are in our lives. It continues by exploring the text through a range of activities that include explicit grammar teaching, opportunities for shorter written outcomes and book talk. Children create a story-map of the key events from the book to write a sequel and create a set of instruction to describe how their own flying machine works. Children finish by writing a longer story about an adventure in a sequel to the text. Synopsis of Text:This book tells the story of a father and son and a dream to fly. The father is possessed with an unrelenting desire to fly which he never achieves. When the father goes off to war and doesn’t return, the dream of flying passes on to his son. How easy and natural love is if you are well! And how gruesomely difficult—what a philosophically daunting contraption of self-interest and self-delusion love appears to be—if you are not!”