New books to notice

   KRT PAPERBACK SELECTIONS
   Blue Latitudes: Boldly Going Where Captain Cook Has Gone Before by Tony Horwitz (Picador, $15): One of history's most famous navigators and cartographers, James Cook set sail in 1768 for the South Pacific and ended up discovering New Zealand, Australia, Hawaii and Alaska. He was the toast of Europe before he began his futile search for the fabled Northwest Passage and was clubbed to death on a beach in Hawaii in 1779. More than two centuries later, Horwitz works as a sailor aboard a replica of Cook's ship and offers a rollicking adventure-travelogue-history.
   Pirate Hunter: The True Story of Captain Kidd by Richard Zacks (Hyperion, $15.95): And you thought Captain Kidd was a pirate. Actually, William Kidd was a ship's captain-turned-privateer commissioned by the British government to track down pirated ships and bloodthirsty buccaneers. Among them was Robert Culliford, and Zacks centers his book on the ongoing duel between Culliford and Kidd.
   The Curse of Treasure Island by Francis Bryan (NAL, $12.95): Bryan conjures up the swashbuckling spirit of Robert Louis Stevenson's 1883 classic Treasure Island with a sequel set 10 years after young Jim Hawkins' first adventure. Now, he's 24 and running the Admiral Benbow Inn when the arrival of a beautiful young woman and her small son causes him to set a return course to Treasure Island.
   Life of Pi by Yann Martel (Harvest, $14): And now for something completely different: Martel's inventive tale of Pi Patel, the 16-year-old son of an Indian zookeeper. After being shipwrecked on his way to America, Pi ends up in a lifeboat with several animals, including a magnificent Bengal tiger called Richard Parker. It's an outlandish story that Pi tells, so he also offers another. Martel's novel is as much about the art of storytelling and the act of memory as it is a tale of a boy and a tiger.