FArTHER

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Still, Cook is a fascinating individual. The son of a pigslop, he enlisted in the Royal Navy at seventeen as a young man with no experience and no connections. Through application and ability, he rose to the rank of post-captain and became something of a media superstar. Through it all, he was a family man who rarely saw his family, a Sailor who pined for home but, when at home, found himself pining for the sea. On his voyages, of which there were three major ones with him in command, he began as an admirer of the Pacific cultures he discovered. His admiration grew into fascination, such that some in the Admiralty began to fear he'd "gone native." By the time of his last voyage, however, he'd begun to believe his own legend and started brutalizing both his own men and any islanders who defied him. These are the words of a man who doesn’t care what anyone (besides George Orwell and Thomas Paine) thinks. Hitchens reveled in his contrarian status. Franzen seems conflicted by his contrarian status. And Franzen doesn't speak with a posh Oxford accent, either, so he doesn't get a pass. FArTHER is the story of a father who dreams of flying. However, when he goes to war and does not return, his son attempts to finish where he left off and makes his dream come true. Winner of the 2012 Greenaway award, this truly is an inspirational story showing how any dream can be fulfilled with love and motivation. 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. But on the whole the book was interesting and informative, and where it fell short (James Cook discovered the cure for scurvy - um, not exactly...) I did a bit of internet research and filled in some gaps. At the end of the book I felt like there were still questions in my mind about how I should feel about Cook, but at least now I know more about where he came from and what a remarkable life he led. If I have a chance to read more analysis on his place in history and where he went wrong near the end ("almost as if Cook were suffering from dementia..."?) I probably will.

Sabbath’s theater” и е започнал да приема Рот като приятел, а не като враг (в смисъл на литературно влияние).

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A genius has ways of manifesting his boredom, often with displays of cruelty. Franzen tells an interesting anecdote about Wallace signing copies of his novels to Franzen: Very early in the book it is expressed that things do not go well for the Captain. As we read about his meteoric rise to fame, there's a nagging afterthought that something terrible is about to happen. And indeed it does in time. It's curious to see the politics behind the missions. The absolute necessity to have a win in a time when faith in Britain was failing due to the feud with the colonies.

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. 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.” 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'. An easy to read explorer/adventure story with just the right level of detail for me - I learned lots of things about Cook that I didn't know (that I probably should've known, given the hero worship of him in NZ) but the story wasn't bogged down with excessive detail. One of the most humiliating aspects of friendship with a genius - and again, Franzen never quite says this, although he sort of implies it by some of his anecdotes - is the fact that a genius is bored most of the time, and that includes most of the time he is with you. Like I said, this is a humiliating realization. All those years I tried - the way Franzen admits that he did with Wallace - to be smart and funny - only to have my friend find far more of interest in the non-literary, the non-intellectual, the non-sober. Because, well, those people were intrinsically more interesting than my frantically patched-together quasi-intellectual-Bohemian posturings and half-baked, half-educated "opinions." It took me years to get over my own snobbery and bombast and bullshit that obscured the fact that, yep, a guy who is really good at vehicle electronics is almost always more interesting and enjoyable to spend time with than someone with an MFA full of bureaucratic (i.e. academic) or corporate ambitions - more interesting than me, I mean. Not forever, not to be roomies, but in the mere moment-to-moment encounters with other people, a genius finds those people with a grasp on the actual are far more...something. Real? Lovable? Interesting? Real lovably interesting? I don't know what, but to some extent, I do understand it now, if a bit late in the game.

Unless the book has been, in some way, for the writer, an adventure into the unknown; unless the writer has set himself or herself a personal problem not easily solved; unless the finished book represents the surmounting of some great resistance—it’s not worth reading. Or, for the writer, in my opinion, worth writing." Yet discovering that enthusiasm for birds taught him that he could transform frustrated feelings of helplessness into useful action; if he could just “run toward...pain and anger and despair, rather than away from them,” he could turn hobbies into impassioned journalism: “I started taking on a new kind of journalistic assignment. Whatever I most hated, at a particular moment, became the thing I wanted to write about.”