Biografie van de Noorse ontdekkingsreiziger Thor Heyerdahl (1914- ).

The story of the Pacific journey by six men on a raft in search of the path taken by Kon-Tiki, a white voyager, 1500 years before. Copyright © Libri GmbH. All rights reserved.

Nomination for Best Foreign Film at the 2013 Academy Awards In English and many other languages the name 'Kon-Tiki' has become a byword for adventure and the exotic. The journey of the Kon-Tiki from Peru to Polynesia in 1947 became one of the founding myths of the postwar world. In the voyage of six Scandinavians and a parrot on a balsa raft across the Pacific Ocean the classic journey of discovery was re-invented for generations to come. Kon-Tiki spoke of heroism, masculinity, free-spirited rebellion against scientific dogmatism, and the promise of an attainable exotic world, while it updated these mythological staples to fit the times. After years of relentless media exploitation of the 101-day raft journey, Heyerdahl emerged as the protagonist in a legend that helped to create a new postwar West. A Hero for the Atomic Age tells the story of how Heyerdahl organized an expedition to sail a balsa raft from Callao in Peru to the Tuamotu Islands in French Polynesia, and explains how he turned this physical crossing into an epic narrative that became imbued with a universal appeal. The book also addresses, for the first time, the problematic nature of Heyerdahl's theory that a white culture-bearing race had initiated all the world's great civilizations.

An archival delve into the remarkable life, expeditions and voyages of Thor Heyerdahl, author of the bestselling adventure classic The Kon-Tiki Expedition Norwegian archaeologist, anthropologist, migration theorist, author and explorer Thor Heyerdahl (1914-2002) spent decades substantiating unorthodox migration theories, with equally unconventional research methodologies: namely, practicable experiments that employed the construction of ancient vessels, driven across open oceans and waterways to retrace the movement and settlements of our ancestors. With October 2022 commemorating the 75th anniversary of Thor Heyerdahl's extraordinary 1947 voyage upon a balsa-wood raft, Kon-Tiki, from coastal South America to Polynesia across the Pacific Ocean, an enviable opportunity arises to reexplore Heyerdahl's innovative yet frequently contested theories and expeditions. Afforded unprecedented access to Oslo's Kon-Tiki Museum's extensive Heyerdahl archive, Thor Heyerdahl: Voyages of the Sunassembles a wealth of little-known and previously unseen correspondence, expedition logbooks, journals and photographs. Offering readers new and unexamined narratives from an explorer famed for his radical ideas and vehement rejections of abstracted academic theory, Thor Heyerdahl: Voyages of the Sunreviews the enduring relevance of the explorer's research and assesses it within larger narratives of modern archaeological, anthropological, marine science and migration research; international conservation initiatives; evolving globalization; and essential human-nature symbiosis.