This month we will be reading....
The Wide Wide Sea: Imperial Ambition, First Contact and the Fateful Final Voyage of Captain James Cook 
by Hampton Sides

"In this masterly history, Sides tracks the 18th-century English naval officer James
Cook’s third and final voyage across the globe, painting a vivid and propulsive portrait
that blends generations of scholarship with the firsthand accounts of European
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 a 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." (New York Times Book Review)
Doubleday, 408 pp, 2024

We hope you will join us to discuss this highly praised work of narrative nonfiction.