Amazon.com: Cold Oceans: Adventures in Kayak, Rowboat, and Dogsled: Jonathan Turk: Books

Amazon.com
From its opening passages, Jon Turk's Cold Oceans chronicles explorations in both exterior and interior landscapes. In honest, accessible prose, Turk retraces more than two decades of his varied and stirring adventures--attempting to round Cape Horn solo in a kayak, rowing the Northwest Passage, dogsledding the east coast of Baffin Island, and kayaking from Ellesmere Island to Greenland. As Turk plunges headlong through icy seas, repeated and assorted blunders, and bouts of personal lows, he transcends mere adventure storytelling to explore a changing notion of himself, deepening relationships, and the nature of failure and true success. These passages contain some of Cold Oceans's greatest riches.

With a host of explorers along as inspirational and literary companions, Turk evokes a landscape of life and history intertwined. After a daring 15-hour crossing to Greenland, Turk wrestles with polar explorer Robert Peary's notion of success, defined by fame and fortune, concluding, "What mattered was that he [Peary] communicated his passion to the world." And this is the success that Turk has achieved in Cold Oceans.

Although the saga of choosing a life of adventure to stave off a more rooted and standard existence may seem a common tale, it is Turk's contemplation of this lifestyle choice that offers some of the book's finest insights. Ultimately, Turk's wanderings reveal how a thirst for adventure can at once drive, fragment, and unify a life. This incongruity is perhaps one of a traveler's greatest ponderings, and Cold Oceans confronts it boldly, piercing the heart of what it means to adventure. --Byron Ricks

From Publishers Weekly
Some of the most forbidding areas of the planet, from the Antarctic seas to Canada's Baffin Island, form the backdrop to this lumbering, highly personal memoir of dangerous treks and voyages across inhospitable terrain and water. Despite little experience and, it would seem, not a lot of common sense, Turk, a chemist and adventurer who works on promotion and product development for the outdoor apparel company the North Face, consistently embarks on grand journeys in "some of the coldest, wettest, most remote regions of the world," then bites off more than he can chew. Ill-planned efforts to kayak around Cape Horn and dogsled across Baffin fall short of their goals. There are poignant moments along the way?Turk's account of a sled dog's death and images of snowmobile-riding Inuits who reverentially refer to "the old days" are memorable. But Turk's belief that he can tackle any endeavor without training or wisdom extends at times to his writing. His many wilderness descriptions and epiphanies sometimes lead to prose as rough-hewn?and nearly as compelling?as the landscape itself: "When you climb a mountain, the way back is always downhill." Though readers will likely find tough sledding even when on familiar territory, most will find it hard to be too put off by an adventurer who lost an opportunity to paddle through the Northwest Passage because, in planning, "I had ignored distance, ice, and wind." Five maps. (Sept.) FYI: The North Face is sponsoring Turk's six-city book tour in September.
Copyright 1998 Reed Business Information, Inc.

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Cold Oceans: Adventures in Kayak, Rowboat, and Dogsled (Hardcover)

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