The Dyson's, Freeman and George, are father and son. Freeman, a nobel laureat physicist, has his sights set on the stars. George lives in a tree house in British Columbia and has combined modern materials and ancient techniques to build the largest canoe on the inland water way. See what happens when they reunite in the company of a pod of killer whales.

This is my second read. Not my usual practice.

My one major disappointment is the exclusion from this paperback edition of a section about Freeman Dyson's work on a "safe" nuclear reactor. I found this section particularly interesting because of the specific subject and because of the learning and work principles illustrated. This was an inappropriate job of editing.

Read, enjoy and learn about learning and living and relating in our complex and conflicting world.

The Starship and the Canoe is not a book on kayaking, any more than A Tale of Two Cities is a Victorian travelogue. I felt as though I had to correct that impression created by Amazon's page on the book. Although it is twenty-five years old now, it remains a vital and engrossing tale of a father and son separated not only by the familiar gulf of misunderstanding and culture shock, but by their remarkable journeys, some through the vast and perilous estates of the mind, some through the cold and sparsely settled inlets and bays of the Queen Charlotte Sound and the Pacific shoreline of Alaska and British Columbia.

The father and son are celebrated physicist (and author in his own right) Freeman Dyson and kayaker, tree-dweller, solo marine traveller (and also an author) George Dyson. In the wild, anarchic 1970s, author Kenneth Brower (who, it turns out, is also a friend of George's) takes us along with George and Freeman as they explore and plan explorations. His book is engrossing and one feels as though one has actually spent time with these fascinating, sometimes incredibly eccentric and singular men.

Freeman Dyson, an influential theoretical physicist, spent a great deal of time in the optimistic 1950s and 1960s preparing to push the New Frontier outward on nuclear explosion-powered spacecraft. This work, Project Orion, was supported and funded by NASA and the US Air Force until the atmospheric nuclear test ban, competition for funding from Project Apollo and the Vietnam War finally killed the project's funding leaving him and fellow physicist Ted Taylor to develop the concept further.

Together, the two men pushed the original project's concepts to their ultimate limits, and Project Orion grew to become spacecraft the size of Chicago leaving for nearby stars - so far, however, only in the minds of Dyson, Taylor, and those of us who have become enraptured by the concept of Orion.

Later, son George Dyson ventures up and down the Pacific Coast from California northwards before finally settling (sort of) in the area between Vancouver and the glaciers of Alaska, sometimes living in a treehouse at the top of a tall and spindly fir, sometimes setting off from southern British Columbia up the Queen Charlotte Strait, meeting people on the islands of the strait in voyages oddly reminiscent of Antoine du Saint-Exupery's Le Petit Prince. Brower narrates these journeys with unobtrusive wryness, allowing the reader to chuckle at the interplay between author and subject as they paddle to and for between Alaska and Canada.

Buy this book. Read it. Few other books reward their readers as richly as the Starship and the Canoe.

As both an outdoor loving ocean kayaker and an ardent supporter of space exploration, I found this book a synthesis of two different worlds that are difficult to unite in today's political climate. This book was way ahead of its time.