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    Sea People: In Search of the Ancient Navigators of the Pacific
    Unavailable
    Sea People: In Search of the Ancient Navigators of the Pacific
    Unavailable
    Sea People: In Search of the Ancient Navigators of the Pacific
    Audiobook11 hours

    Sea People: In Search of the Ancient Navigators of the Pacific

    Written by Christina Thompson

    Narrated by Susan Lyons

    4.5/5

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    Unavailable in your country

    Unavailable in your country

    About this audiobook

    Winner of the 2020 Australian Prime Minister’s Literary Award for nonfiction and the 2019 NSW Premier's History Awards for general history

    ‘Wonderfully researched and beautifully written’ Philip Hoare, author of Leviathan

    ‘Succeeds in conjuring a lost world’ Dava Sobel, author of Longitude

    For more than a millennium, Polynesians have occupied the remotest islands in the Pacific Ocean, a vast triangle stretching from Hawaii to New Zealand to Easter Island. Until the arrival of European explorers they were the only people to have ever lived there. Both the most closely related and the most widely dispersed people in the world before the era of mass migration, Polynesians can trace their roots to a group of epic voyagers who ventured out into the unknown in one of the greatest adventures in human history.

    How did the earliest Polynesians find and colonise these far-flung islands? How did a people without writing or metal tools conquer the largest ocean in the world? This conundrum, which came to be known as the Problem of Polynesian Origins, emerged in the eighteenth century as one of the great geographical mysteries of mankind.

    For Christina Thompson, this mystery is personal: her Maori husband and their sons descend directly from these ancient navigators. In Sea People, Thompson explores the fascinating story of these ancestors, as well as those of the many sailors, linguists, archaeologists, folklorists, biologists and geographers who have puzzled over this history for three hundred years. A masterful mix of history, geography, anthropology, and the science of navigation, Sea People is a vivid tour of one of the most captivating regions in the world.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherHarperCollins Publishers
    Release dateMar 12, 2019
    ISBN9780008339043
    Unavailable
    Sea People: In Search of the Ancient Navigators of the Pacific
    Author

    Christina Thompson

    Christina Thompson is the editor of Harvard Review and the author of Come On Shore and We Will Kill and Eat You All: A New Zealand Story, which was shortlisted for the Douglas Stewart Prize for Non-fiction and the William Saroyan International Prize for Writing. Her essays and criticism have appeared in numerous publications, including Vogue, the American Scholar, the Journal of Pacific History, and three editions of Best Australian Essays. She is the recipient of numerous fellowships and awards, including a National Endowment for the Arts Creative Writing Fellowship, a Writer's Grant from the Australia Council, and a National Endowment for the Humanities Public Scholar Award. A dual citizen of the US and Australia, she lives outside of Boston with her family.

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    Reviews for Sea People

    4.5/5

    9 ratings3 reviews

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    • 5/5
      Brilliant and in depth account of Polynesian history, beautiful written end engrossingly interesting
    • 5/5
      Well researched and written. Accurate cultural history and interrelationship between islands

      1 person found this helpful

    • 5/5
      Fantastic book and easy listening narration. I was looking for a book to introduce me to Polynesian history and culture, which this work does incredibly well. It's useful in part as an academic source, as it references a long list of historians and anthropologists for further reading. Would recommend it to anyone who wants to learn about the Pacific and its peoples for any reason.

      1 person found this helpful