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The Real-Life Captain Kirk

An exciting new bestseller brings fresh life to the man who inspired the most famous line on Star Trek

Janice Harayda
Counter Arts
6 min readJan 9, 2025

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Capt. James Cook and his ships
Captain James Cook and his ships / National Maritime Museum via Wikimedia Commons

Poor Captain Cook. Some people remember him only as an inspiration for Captain James Kirk of the Starship Enterprise.

Hampton Sides shows how much they’re missing in his latest book of popular history, The Wide Wide Sea. His book brings more drama to the story of the British explorer’s final voyage than you’ll find in — dare I say it? — some episodes of Star Trek.

James Cook has been slaughtered twice. First he was slain in Hawaii after abducting a native king he hoped to exchange for a boat islanders had stolen. More recently, assaults on his reputation have led to the toppling of statues and the vandalizing of monuments to his achievements.

Sides brings Cook to life for a postcolonial generation that requires more complexity than existed in the swashbuckling maritime adventures of yesteryear.

A victim of his own hubris

Sides’ new book is a bestselling page-turner in the spirit of David Grann’s The Wager and Candice Millard’s The River of Doubt. Its appeal lies above all in good storytelling, not in stumping for radical new theories or keeping alive outdated myths of discovery and…

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Counter Arts
Counter Arts

Published in Counter Arts

The (Counter)Cultural One-Stop for Nonfiction on Medium… incorporating categories for: ‘Art’, ‘Culture’, ‘Equality’, ‘Photography’, ‘Film’, ‘Mental Health’, ‘Music’ and ‘Literature’.

Janice Harayda
Janice Harayda

Written by Janice Harayda

Critic, novelist, award-winning journalist. Former book editor of the Plain Dealer and book columnist for Glamour. Words in NYT, WSJ, and other major media.

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