Word: kon
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...wife of a Tahitian planter who had entertained Voyager Thor Heyerdahl and friends at a hula party in Papeete decided that the dance was strictly a private affair, never meant for public eyes. Since Heyerdahl filmed it, then used a few seconds of the shot in his movie Kon-Tiki, she sued...
Thor Heyerdahl was a determined scientist with a theory. It was his belief that a resolute young man, by rafting across the Pacific, could earn enough money to retire for life. "Kon-Tiki"--which has grossed him an estimated four million--has proven Heyerdahl's point, and it's also a darn good movie...
...said would never come back alive" and how he "threw himself at the mercy of the Pacific." An adventure, as every adventurer knows, is adventurous only in the retelling; and nothing can be so downright dull as three months on a raft. But after Mr. Grauer's hyperbolic foreword, "Kon-Tiki" luckily avoids the perils-of-the-deep, the yoicks-man-overboard, and the eek-it's-a-man-eating-shark, episodes that seem presaged by the opening. It becomes the tale, always unusual and often rather scientific, of life in a strange new world, where parrots bite radio aerials...
...photography, although it necessarily leaves you somewhat sea-sick, is excellent considering the conditions; and the accent of narrator Heyerdahl is pleasingly inscrutable. The well-versed conversationalist won't miss "Kon-Tiki...
...typical chapter is Miss Carson's biography of the surface waters. Here is the snake-mackerel, up from the depths, first seen in living form by the Kon-Tiki expedition; here the uncountable creatures called plankton, a community of minute animals and plants. In the ocean food cycle, plankton is eaten by such small fish as the herring, small fish by larger ones like the tuna, larger ones by squids, and all of these by whales. To survive, sea creatures assume remarkable disguises: the Sargasso Sea slug has a soft, shapeless body, exactly like the vegetation in which...