Kon-Tiki: Across the Pacific by Raft by Thor Heyerdahl
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

I’m one-quarter Norwegian, but it feels like it should be a bigger percentage. I read about polar explorer Roald Amundsen and was excited to read about Thor Heyerdahl’s equally exciting adventure. Heyerdahl wanted to prove a point by sailing on a large raft 4,300 nautical miles from Peru to Polynesia. I owned the book and then, fairly randomly, my daughter, Gina, and I watched a 2012 film about the expedition (which earned an Academy Award and Golden Globe nomination for Best Foreign Language Film.) The film was good. The book, written by Thor himself, was better. The group of mostly non-sailors experienced things very few humans have had or will ever have, crossing the ocean with no motor, just the wind and the currents. Heyerdahl wanted to prove the so-called primitive people from South America settled Polynesia in pre-Columbia times. He was right. They created a raft using only the materials, like balsa logs, and technologies available in the pre-Columbia times. They did not take any short cuts. They named their craft Kon-Tiki after an Inca god. In three months at sea in 1947, the men float along the ocean encountering all manner of sea life. They killed a lot of sharks. The story is really unbelievable. Even before they get in the water. How they got the funding. How they got the logs. Unbelievable. Reading stories like this makes you believe that anything is possible.