Professor Ryan Jones, the Ann Swindells Chair and department head of the University of Oregon’s Department of History, will review The Wide Wide Sea: Imperial Ambition, First Contact, and the Fateful Final Voyage of Captain James Cook, by Hampton Sides. This is part will be February iteration of the library’s ongoing Random Review series.
Set for Wednesday, February 11 at noon, this is a free event. In-person, you can attend at Corvallis-Benton County Public Library Main Meeting Room, 645 NW Monroe Ave, or you can click here to attend online.
About the book, and author
Hampton Sides’s best-selling history of Captain Cook’s controversial final voyage was named a best book of the year by The New York Times, Time, The Economist, NPR, The New Yorker, The Smithsonian, and Kirkus Reviews. It is an engrossing tale of adventure on the high seas and a life of this remarkable seaman of the British Empire. Sides’s detailed narrative tracks Cook and his men from England through the Indian Ocean to Australia and New Zealand, along the Pacific Coast to Alaska and the Arctic Ocean and back to Hawaii in the momentous year of 1776.
An American historian, author and journalist, Sides is the author of many bestselling works of narrative history and literary non-fiction.
About the reviewer
Ryan T. Jones holds a PhD in history from Columbia University. He is the author of Empire of Extinction: Russians and the Strange Beasts of the Sea (Oxford, 2014) as well as Red Leviathan: The Soviet Union and the Secret Destruction of the World’s Whales (University of Chicago Press, 2022), which was shortlisted for the Pushkin House Book Prize.
About Random Review
Random Review is a deep exploration of a selected book by a reviewer with expertise on the topic or theme of that book. Sometimes reviewers cover a classic, series, genre, or author, but usually they cover a specific title. Whether you have read the selection or not, you will love Random Review.
Random Review is co-sponsored by The Friends and Foundation of the Corvallis-Benton County Public Library. Reviews are held on the second Wednesday of the month from noon to 1 pm in the Main Meeting Room and are also livestreamed online at this link: cbcpl.net/RR2526. Random Review events are open to the public and free of charge.
For more information, contact the library at 541-766-6793. Call 541-766-6928 to request accommodations.
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