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August 11, 2003
Marine Biological Laboratory Sponsors Lecture, Booksigning from Pulitzer-Prize Winning Author Tony Horwitz

Event is celebration of Laboratory’s New Captain Cook Exhibit

WOODS HOLE, MA - Author Tony Horwitz will present a lecture based on his recent New York Times bestseller, "BLUE LATITUDES: Boldly Going Where Captain Cook Has Gone Before" on Tuesday, August 19. The Marine Biological Laboratory (MBL) is sponsoring the special lecture, which will be held at 7:00 PM in the Laboratory’s Lillie Auditorium, MBL Street, Woods Hole. The lecture is free and open to the public.

A reception and exhibit opening will immediately follow Horwitz's lecture in the Meigs Room of the MBL’s Swope Conference Center. The art exhibit, entitled "Cook's Tours: The Art of Exploration," is the latest in a series of exhibits reproduced from the collections of the MBL/WHOI Library.

Captain James Cook set out on a series of three monumental voyages, between 1768-1780, to explore uncharted territories of the Pacific. He was accompanied by noted naturalists, astronomers, botanists, physicians, and artists as well as a crew of 100 men.
The MBL exhibition focuses on the images produced by the artists on the three voyages. The show also celebrates a recent donation to the MBL/WHOI Library Archives of the three volume "Account of Voyages to the Southern Hemisphere."

In his book, BLUE LATITUDES, Horwitz presents an exhilarating tale of high seas adventure in an eye-opening portrait of one of history’s greatest navigators. Complete with Horwitz’s unique mixture of history, travel, and humor, BLUE LATITUDES brings to life a man who helped create the global village we inhabit today.

Pursuing Cook and the story behind his extraordinary travels, Horwitz set off on his own voyage of discovery. To experience the thrill and terror of sailing a tall ship, he signed on as a working crewman aboard a replica of Cook’s vessel. To relive Cook’s journeys and to explore their legacy in the present day, Horwitz traveled in the captain’s wake to such places as Bora Bora, Niue, Alaska, and the Great Barrier Reef. At turns insightful and thrilling, poignant and hilarious, BLUE LATITUDES revealed how history lives among us in the most unlikely places.

Tony Horwitz is a native of Washington D.C. and a graduate of Brown University and Columbia University’s Graduate School of Journalism. He has worked as a union organizer in rural Mississippi where he made a documentary for PBS about Southern timber workers. Horwitz lived overseas with his Australian wife for a decade and filed dispatches from forty countries, often as a war correspondent covering conflicts in the Persian Gulf, Sudan, Lebanon, Bosnia, and Northern Ireland. He has worked as a journalist for The Wall Street Journal and as a staff writer for The New Yorker and was awarded the Pulitzer Prize in Journalism in 1995 for a series on working conditions in low-wage America. His previous books include One for The Road, the national bestseller Baghdad Without a Map and Confederates in the Attic, a national and New York Times bestseller. He lives in Virginia with his wife, the novelist Geraldine Brooks, and their son Nathaniel.

Copies of BLUE LATITUDES will be available for purchase in the Lillie lobby. Horwitz will sign books following the lecture. For more information about the lecture or reception, contact the Marine Biological Laboratory's Communications and Public Information Office at 508-289-7423.

The Marine Biological Laboratory, located in Woods Hole, Massachusetts, is an independent scientific institution, founded in 1888, that undertakes the highest level of creative research and education in biology, including the biomedical and environmental sciences.