In June of 2002, war looms and Saddam Hussein still has a brutal grip on a nation in disarray. Sara Daniel travels the length and breadth of Iraq, following the fast-evolving events and interviewing people from all walks of life and all religious and political affiliations: from the Kurds in the north to the rising new politicians in Baghdad and beyond; from the insurgents in Sadr City and Fallujah to the police chief in Basra; from the hospital doctors tending the maimed and wounded to the directors of museums whose collections were ruthlessly pillaged; from ordinary men and women in the streets to those vying to fill the void of power; from American soldiers on deadly street patrol to the highest-ranking officers. Voyage to a Stricken Land offers a cogent, personal history of one of America’s most controversial conflicts.

On his second expedition to the Pacific, in the years 1772-5, Captain James Cook made a voyage which, in the annals of exploration, is unsurpassed for grandeur of design and execution and for variety of experience. Cook traversed the Indian and Pacific Oceans in high latitudes, demonstrating that the supposed Southern continent could not extend north of 60°. Cook three times crossed the Antarctic Circle reaching his furthest south in 71° 10 ́, and he proved himself a master of navigation in ice. In the Pacific his discoveries or rediscoveries included the Tonga Islands, Easter Island, the Marquesas, the New Hebrides and New Caledonia, with the sub-antarctic islands of South Georgia and the South Sandwich group. Captain Furneaux, commanding the consort ship, examined the coasts of Tasmania. The written and graphic records left by Cook himself and by his officers, by the astronomer William Wales and the artist William Hodges, by the naturalists J.R. and George Forster are remarkable in their volume and vitality. The editor, Dr J.C. Beaglehole, here prints the full text of Cook’s own journal, constructed from two holograph MSS and several MS copies, and a great part of Wales’s journal. This facsimile edition reprints the edition of 1961 along with the Addenda and Corrigenda published in 1969. The illustrations originally in colour are reproduced in black-and-white, the fold-outs divided to fit on separate pages, and the volume split into two parts.