Hampton Sides
Author of Ghost Soldiers: The Epic Account of World War II's Greatest Rescue Mission
About the Author
Hampton Sides, contributing editor of "Outside" & editor of "The Wild File," is also the author of "Ghost Soldiers". He lives in Santa Fe, New Mexico. (Publisher Provided) Hampton Sides received a BA in history from Yale University. He is editor-at-large for Outside Magazine and has also written show more for National Geographic, The New Yorker, Esquire, Preservation, and Men's Journal. His magazine work has been nominated twice for National Magazine Awards for feature writing. He is the author of several books including Ghost Soldiers, Blood and Thunder, Hellhound on His Trail, and In the Kingdom of Ice. (Bowker Author Biography) show less
Image credit: Author Hampton Sides at the 2018 Texas Book Festival in Austin, Texas, United States. By Larry D. Moore, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=74237058
Works by Hampton Sides
Ghost Soldiers: The Epic Account of World War II's Greatest Rescue Mission (2001) 3,161 copies, 62 reviews
Blood and Thunder: The Epic Story of Kit Carson and the Conquest of the American West (2006) — Author — 2,202 copies, 46 reviews
In the Kingdom of Ice: The Grand and Terrible Polar Voyage of the USS Jeannette (2014) — Author — 1,479 copies, 67 reviews
Hellhound on His Trail: The Stalking of Martin Luther King, Jr., and the International Hunt for His Assassin (2010) — Author; Narrator, some editions — 1,035 copies, 47 reviews
The Wide Wide Sea: Imperial Ambition, First Contact and the Fateful Final Voyage of Captain James Cook (2024) — Author — 898 copies, 26 reviews
On Desperate Ground: The Marines at The Reservoir, the Korean War's Greatest Battle (2018) — Author — 471 copies, 20 reviews
Why Moths Hate Thomas Edison: And Other Urgent Inquiries into the Odd Nature of Nature (Outside Books) (2001) — Editor — 73 copies, 1 review
Ghost Soldiers: The Forgotten Epic Story of World War II's Most Dramatic Mission {abridged audio} (2001) 32 copies, 3 reviews
Stomping Grounds: A Pilgrim's Progress Through Eight American Subcultures (1992) — Author — 30 copies
Unseen Titanic 1 copy
In pursuit of happiness 1 copy
Associated Works
Tagged
Common Knowledge
- Canonical name
- Sides, Hampton
- Legal name
- Sides, W. Hampton
- Birthdate
- 1962
- Gender
- male
- Education
- Yale University
- Occupations
- journalist
- Organizations
- Outside
- Awards and honors
- 2002 PEN USA Award for nonfiction
2002 Discover Award from Barnes & Noble - Short biography
- Hampton Sides (born 1962 in Memphis, Tennessee) is an American historian and journalist. He is the author of Hellhound on His Trail, Ghost Soldiers, Blood and Thunder, and other bestselling works of narrative history and literary non-fiction. Sides is editor-at-large for Outside magazine and has written for such periodicals as National Geographic, The New Yorker, Esquire, Men's Journal, and The Washington Post. His magazine work, collected in numerous published anthologies, has been twice nominated for National Magazine Awards for feature writing.
- Nationality
- USA
- Birthplace
- Memphis, Tennessee, USA
- Places of residence
- Memphis, Tennessee, USA
Santa Fe, New Mexico, USA - Associated Place (for map)
- USA
Members
Reviews
The Wide Wide Sea: Imperial Ambition, First Contact and the Fateful Final Voyage of Captain James Cook by Hampton Sides
To a bibliophilic teenager, the Age of Exploration once thrilled, alive with swashbuckling and romantic adventure. At that time, heroic European explorers were rarely acknowledged to have discovered lands and coastlines long occupied by people of other cultures. No longer are such histories tenable, not in the present era where these discoveries are understood in multiple contexts, including as the forerunners of colonial exploitation, and often the precursors to the collapse of indigenous show more cultures on a massive scale. Charles Mann describes the process in the Americas in two influential popular books 1491 and 1493, the first an account of the flourishing of Pre-Columbian civilizations, and the second their crumbling in the face of imperial theft and cataclysmic infectious disease.
Hampton Sides, an American history writer, aims to tell the story of James Cook from a more nuanced perspective. Captain Cook has played an outsized role as one the last great explorers of the period. He made prolific contributions to the map of the Pacific, and to the study of the natural history of vast regions. But in recent years, people from New Zealand to British Columbia have rejected monuments and geographical names memorializing his career. Sides aspires to include the perspectives of those Cook encountered along the way as he tells the story of the third and final voyage.
Cook enjoyed a singular nautical reputation in 1776, having retired at 46 following the completion of his second voyage. On his first voyage in his ship Endeavor, he circumnavigated the globe, observed from Tahiti the rare transit of Venus across the sun, made first contact with the Maori, and charted hitherto unknown regions of the South Pacific. His collaboration with botanist Joseph Banks yielded a wealth of scientific data. His second voyage expanded his explorations in the Pacific, tested a new marine chronometer which for the first time allowed accurate measurements of latitude, and made the first foray south of the Antarctic Circle.
Cook’s remit from the British Crown for a third voyage had a primary objective: search for the elusive Northwest Passage, a shortcut to Asia and its lucrative wares and markets, but this time from the western side of North America. The details of the Alaskan coast and the waterways to the north and east were still unknown, and Cook’s mapmaking, surveying, and captaincy were much respected. He was well regarded for his maturity, steadiness, tolerance, and judgment. But he assumed a second task as well. A Polynesian man named Mai had arrived in England in 1774 on Cook’s companion ship during the second voyage. A talented individual, he had learned English under the sponsorship of Joseph Banks, absorbed much of English life and culture, and won the affection of many prominent Englishmen. King George III promised Mai would be returned to his people. The King had a broader concept in mind, one in retrospect naive and imprudent. He would send animals, plants, seeds with Cook from the Royal farmlands to Polynesia to establish English-style farms for Mai’s countrymen. Apparently the limitless supply of seafood and fresh fruit the islanders enjoyed made little impression on His Majesty.
Sides narrates Cook’s unprecedented journey: Near disaster in New Zealand; the return of Mai, whose sojourn in England apparently inflated his ego and sabotaged his interactions with his relations; a happy holiday in Hawaii; the search for the Northwest Passage in Alaska. (Spoiler: he didn’t find it.) And evoking Magellan’s fate two centuries earlier, Cook’s violent death during the unhappy return to Hawaii. Cook’s last voyage paints on an immense canvas geographically and culturally, and the cast of characters is similarly diverse: British explorers, Polynesian Islanders, western North Americans, even Siberian indigenous people. Predictably, this mixing yields both exhilaration and tragedy.
What of Sides’ project, to tell the story from multiple points of view? Credit him with trying. The reality is that Cook’s voyage is amply documented, and the sheer volume of that information dwarves what can be known of Polynesian perspectives. The Maori and Polynesians preserved history in oral traditions. There are no records to review. Sides presents what can be inferred from English accounts, and from the events they described. He attends to obvious differences in attitudes toward private property and sexual mores. He uses the case of Mai’s return liberally, elaborating on the British attempts to make sense of the ill will he seemed to generate. There are Maori and Polynesian scholars today whose perspectives Sides presents. Cook’s death itself has been the subject of much analysis over the centuries. Was it a demonstration by angry or anxious Hawaiians that their god Lono was in fact all-powerful, and that Cook was not a god after all? Or as some scholars of Hawaiian culture of the period argue, was he well understood to be mortal all along, and his death the result of hubris and miscalculation?
Cook’s voyage is arguably the last great odyssey of the Age of Exploration. But in another sense, it is the first of a newer age of European science, one grounded less in the Enlightenment astronomy and physics of Galileo and Newton, and more located in the naturalism and dynamism of the Romantic period. Cook precedes the subsequent seekers and colonialists. Could their consequences be reflected in Star Trek’s famous Prime Directive: the principle of noninterference in the development of newly discovered alien cultures? First Contact is an illuminating, thrilling but risky undertaking. Cook is an end and a beginning. His story is instructive and well told here, the limits of broader perspectival inclusion notwithstanding. Alternatively, in our era of polarized points of view, perhaps the story is all the more instructive because of how those limits constrain the fullness of our understanding. show less
Hampton Sides, an American history writer, aims to tell the story of James Cook from a more nuanced perspective. Captain Cook has played an outsized role as one the last great explorers of the period. He made prolific contributions to the map of the Pacific, and to the study of the natural history of vast regions. But in recent years, people from New Zealand to British Columbia have rejected monuments and geographical names memorializing his career. Sides aspires to include the perspectives of those Cook encountered along the way as he tells the story of the third and final voyage.
Cook enjoyed a singular nautical reputation in 1776, having retired at 46 following the completion of his second voyage. On his first voyage in his ship Endeavor, he circumnavigated the globe, observed from Tahiti the rare transit of Venus across the sun, made first contact with the Maori, and charted hitherto unknown regions of the South Pacific. His collaboration with botanist Joseph Banks yielded a wealth of scientific data. His second voyage expanded his explorations in the Pacific, tested a new marine chronometer which for the first time allowed accurate measurements of latitude, and made the first foray south of the Antarctic Circle.
Cook’s remit from the British Crown for a third voyage had a primary objective: search for the elusive Northwest Passage, a shortcut to Asia and its lucrative wares and markets, but this time from the western side of North America. The details of the Alaskan coast and the waterways to the north and east were still unknown, and Cook’s mapmaking, surveying, and captaincy were much respected. He was well regarded for his maturity, steadiness, tolerance, and judgment. But he assumed a second task as well. A Polynesian man named Mai had arrived in England in 1774 on Cook’s companion ship during the second voyage. A talented individual, he had learned English under the sponsorship of Joseph Banks, absorbed much of English life and culture, and won the affection of many prominent Englishmen. King George III promised Mai would be returned to his people. The King had a broader concept in mind, one in retrospect naive and imprudent. He would send animals, plants, seeds with Cook from the Royal farmlands to Polynesia to establish English-style farms for Mai’s countrymen. Apparently the limitless supply of seafood and fresh fruit the islanders enjoyed made little impression on His Majesty.
Sides narrates Cook’s unprecedented journey: Near disaster in New Zealand; the return of Mai, whose sojourn in England apparently inflated his ego and sabotaged his interactions with his relations; a happy holiday in Hawaii; the search for the Northwest Passage in Alaska. (Spoiler: he didn’t find it.) And evoking Magellan’s fate two centuries earlier, Cook’s violent death during the unhappy return to Hawaii. Cook’s last voyage paints on an immense canvas geographically and culturally, and the cast of characters is similarly diverse: British explorers, Polynesian Islanders, western North Americans, even Siberian indigenous people. Predictably, this mixing yields both exhilaration and tragedy.
What of Sides’ project, to tell the story from multiple points of view? Credit him with trying. The reality is that Cook’s voyage is amply documented, and the sheer volume of that information dwarves what can be known of Polynesian perspectives. The Maori and Polynesians preserved history in oral traditions. There are no records to review. Sides presents what can be inferred from English accounts, and from the events they described. He attends to obvious differences in attitudes toward private property and sexual mores. He uses the case of Mai’s return liberally, elaborating on the British attempts to make sense of the ill will he seemed to generate. There are Maori and Polynesian scholars today whose perspectives Sides presents. Cook’s death itself has been the subject of much analysis over the centuries. Was it a demonstration by angry or anxious Hawaiians that their god Lono was in fact all-powerful, and that Cook was not a god after all? Or as some scholars of Hawaiian culture of the period argue, was he well understood to be mortal all along, and his death the result of hubris and miscalculation?
Cook’s voyage is arguably the last great odyssey of the Age of Exploration. But in another sense, it is the first of a newer age of European science, one grounded less in the Enlightenment astronomy and physics of Galileo and Newton, and more located in the naturalism and dynamism of the Romantic period. Cook precedes the subsequent seekers and colonialists. Could their consequences be reflected in Star Trek’s famous Prime Directive: the principle of noninterference in the development of newly discovered alien cultures? First Contact is an illuminating, thrilling but risky undertaking. Cook is an end and a beginning. His story is instructive and well told here, the limits of broader perspectival inclusion notwithstanding. Alternatively, in our era of polarized points of view, perhaps the story is all the more instructive because of how those limits constrain the fullness of our understanding. show less
Hellhound on His Trail: The Stalking of Martin Luther King, Jr. and the International Hunt for His Assassin by Hampton Sides
"Discrimination is a hellhound" - MLK 1967
In the late afternoon of April 4, 1968, Martin Luther King Jr. was killed by a single gunshot fired from a distance. The manhunt for his assassin would be the largest in American history and cover two continents and five countries. King had been drawn to Memphis to support striking sanitation workers after two men were crushed to death in a garbage truck accident. His assassin was drawn to Memphis by racism and a desire to kill King. In the end the show more manhunt led to a drifter who had escaped from prison in a breadbox nearly a year before, and would culminate sixty-five days later when he was apprehended by Scotland Yard detectives in London.
I've been sitting on this book for nearly a year, not especially interested in the history of the civil rights movement but having enjoyed other books by the author. I'd appreciated Hampton Sides ability to tell a good story in Ghost Soldiers and Blood and Thunder, and having recently finished another excellent book on the near assassination of Ronald Reagan, I thought it might be time to read this one - and Hellhound doesn't disappoint! Sides brings the story alive with thousands of small details, reconstructing the trail of Prisoner #416J as he morphs through a list of aliases - Eric Starvo Galt, Harvey Lowmeyer, John Willard, Paul Bridgman, Ramon George Sneyd - but in the end he was just a middle-aged racist named James Earl Ray who'd been discharged from the Army for "ineptness" and carried a rap sheet as long as his arm.
But Sides weaves the story of Galt/Ray into the mission of Martin Luther King and his fading civil rights campaign. The non-violence movement was splintering under the frustration of others such as Jesse Jackson, and the initial march in Memphis had gone terribly awry further undermining his Poor People's Campaign. J. Edgar Hoover hovers on the sidelines as well, as the adversary who had relentlessly spied on King to being responsible to hunt down his killer. Sides is careful to stick to the facts - mentioning but not veering off into conspiracy theories - which results in a story that's impossible to put down. The account of King's shooting is extremely sad, but it was a fascinating part of history which I had largely ignored and a book I strongly recommend. show less
In the late afternoon of April 4, 1968, Martin Luther King Jr. was killed by a single gunshot fired from a distance. The manhunt for his assassin would be the largest in American history and cover two continents and five countries. King had been drawn to Memphis to support striking sanitation workers after two men were crushed to death in a garbage truck accident. His assassin was drawn to Memphis by racism and a desire to kill King. In the end the show more manhunt led to a drifter who had escaped from prison in a breadbox nearly a year before, and would culminate sixty-five days later when he was apprehended by Scotland Yard detectives in London.
I've been sitting on this book for nearly a year, not especially interested in the history of the civil rights movement but having enjoyed other books by the author. I'd appreciated Hampton Sides ability to tell a good story in Ghost Soldiers and Blood and Thunder, and having recently finished another excellent book on the near assassination of Ronald Reagan, I thought it might be time to read this one - and Hellhound doesn't disappoint! Sides brings the story alive with thousands of small details, reconstructing the trail of Prisoner #416J as he morphs through a list of aliases - Eric Starvo Galt, Harvey Lowmeyer, John Willard, Paul Bridgman, Ramon George Sneyd - but in the end he was just a middle-aged racist named James Earl Ray who'd been discharged from the Army for "ineptness" and carried a rap sheet as long as his arm.
But Sides weaves the story of Galt/Ray into the mission of Martin Luther King and his fading civil rights campaign. The non-violence movement was splintering under the frustration of others such as Jesse Jackson, and the initial march in Memphis had gone terribly awry further undermining his Poor People's Campaign. J. Edgar Hoover hovers on the sidelines as well, as the adversary who had relentlessly spied on King to being responsible to hunt down his killer. Sides is careful to stick to the facts - mentioning but not veering off into conspiracy theories - which results in a story that's impossible to put down. The account of King's shooting is extremely sad, but it was a fascinating part of history which I had largely ignored and a book I strongly recommend. show less
The Wide Wide Sea: Imperial Ambition, First Contact and the Fateful Final Voyage of Captain James Cook by Hampton Sides
Of course, I had heard of Captain James Cook, one of the greatest explorers of all time but I had never read anything specifically about him. Well, leave it to Hampton Sides, one of my favorite nonfiction authors, to set me straight. In July 1776, Cook embarked on his final journey. His mission was to map out as much of the Pacific, as he could. From New Zealand to Alaska and back. Two and a half years later, after sailing thousands and thousands of miles, he ends up being killed on a show more Hawaiian island, by the natives there. This is a fantastic tale of the Age of Exploration, with both it’s triumphs and it’s fateful consequences, crafted by a master storyteller. Highly recommended. show less
Blood and Thunder: The Epic Story of Kit Carson and the Conquest of the American West by Hampton Sides
One of the best narrative histories I’ve read in recent years, Hampton Sides’ impressive work cuts through the legends and myths that have developed around Kit Carson, provides a balanced view of his personality and, in the process, draws a vivid picture of what life was like in the 1820’s – 1860’s in western America. Carson became famous during his time, but shunned celebrity. He was unschooled but spoke many languages. He was seen both as a hero and villain, depending on show more perspective. This book explores his complex personality, fierce loyalty, quiet demeanor, and decisive actions. Almost like an 1800’s version of Forrest Gump, Carson had a knack for being at the center of significant historical events. Sides focuses on Carson’s remarkable life as a focal point and common thread in conveying the often-brutal history of the American West, covering the panoramic drama that shaped the history of the region.
I gained an appreciation for the personalities involved – not only Kit Carson, but also John C. Fremont, James K. Polk, Stephen Watts Kearny, Edward Canby, Thomas Hart Benton, Jessie Benton Fremont, James Henry Carleton, Navajo leaders Narbona, Manuelito, and Barboncito, and a host of others. This book covers Carson’s many roles as a trapper, scout, explorer, soldier, and family man. It never strays too far from his life in relating historic events. It covers a vast swath of history: the expansion of the United States into current-day California, Oregon, Nevada, Arizona, Utah, Colorado, and New Mexico, the Mexican-American War, the American Civil War battles in New Mexico, and the internecine clashes with the Navajo and other tribes. A significant portion is devoted to the encroachment of white civilization on the aboriginal people, as well as related salient issues such as reservations, relocation, and attempts to change their customs and ways of life.
I particularly enjoyed the author’s writing style, which flows artfully and elegantly. His descriptions of the terrain are stunning. He has a gift for telling a compelling story while imparting historic facts. The structure of this book is like a dog herding sheep, shifting among different perspectives, but keeping the multiple storylines moving along. I highly recommend this book to anyone interested in gaining a better understanding of American western expansion and corresponding impact on its people, land, and culture. show less
I gained an appreciation for the personalities involved – not only Kit Carson, but also John C. Fremont, James K. Polk, Stephen Watts Kearny, Edward Canby, Thomas Hart Benton, Jessie Benton Fremont, James Henry Carleton, Navajo leaders Narbona, Manuelito, and Barboncito, and a host of others. This book covers Carson’s many roles as a trapper, scout, explorer, soldier, and family man. It never strays too far from his life in relating historic events. It covers a vast swath of history: the expansion of the United States into current-day California, Oregon, Nevada, Arizona, Utah, Colorado, and New Mexico, the Mexican-American War, the American Civil War battles in New Mexico, and the internecine clashes with the Navajo and other tribes. A significant portion is devoted to the encroachment of white civilization on the aboriginal people, as well as related salient issues such as reservations, relocation, and attempts to change their customs and ways of life.
I particularly enjoyed the author’s writing style, which flows artfully and elegantly. His descriptions of the terrain are stunning. He has a gift for telling a compelling story while imparting historic facts. The structure of this book is like a dog herding sheep, shifting among different perspectives, but keeping the multiple storylines moving along. I highly recommend this book to anyone interested in gaining a better understanding of American western expansion and corresponding impact on its people, land, and culture. show less
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