Ocean Book of the Month Each month in 2007, The Ocean Project will highlight a book focused on our blue planet or environmental sustainability. Books for all age groups will be covered, non-fiction and fiction, prose and poetry. If you have a suggestion, please let us know.
What better way to celebrate our ocean this summer than by reading a fun, fast-paced book about spending over three months traversing the Pacific Ocean? Kon-Tiki recounts the classic story of Thor Heyerdahl’s astonishing 1947 expedition from Peru to the Polynesian Tuamotu Islands. Heyerdahl, and five other crewmen, set out to prove a still-controversial theory that it would have been possible for South American voyagers to have settled Polynesia in pre-Columbian times. To investigate this historical account, they journeyed 4,300 nautical miles across the Pacific Ocean in a balsa wood raft, surviving on flying fish that flopped on board their raft overnight, and relying on a radio as their most modern piece of equipment. Kon-Tiki is an extraordinary saga of 101 days at sea, that illustrates the intriguing relationship between humans, nature, and technology. While much of our world’s ocean remains to be explored, technological advances have changed our perspective of the ocean greatly in the last 60 years. Nothing demonstrates this better than reading a book written 60 years ago, at a time when fish populations were much more abundant, satellites were unavailable, and some biologists didn’t know better than to harpoon whale sharks and kill sea turtles. Check this book out for a captivating adventure story, in a nearly unbelievable setting, and in a very different era. It is particularly interesting for the ocean-minded, and may conjure up feelings of nostalgia for a time when the world’s ocean was a lot healthier than today. Perhaps it will inspire you to make a difference in your life to benefit the ocean. At the very least it will inspire you to explore someplace new this summer!
For any purchase you make online by linking directly from this website to either the legendary independent bookseller, Powell's, or an independent bookstore in your community participating with Book Sense, a small commission will be sent to The Ocean Project to help us continue our nonprofit educational mission, thanks to you!
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© 2007 The Ocean Project - All rights reserved.
Images: © 2007 Wolcott Henry