by David Grann
Doubleday, 2023. 329 pages. Nonfiction
In 1741, British warship the HMS Wager journeyed across the Atlantic and around the southernmost coasts of South America, intending to capture a Spanish galleon filled with silver. After a sudden storm drove it aground on a desolate Chilean island, the surviving crew members quickly turned on one another and their leaders. Violence, murder, and even cannibalism ensue, and eventually a faction of the crewmembers mutiny, abandoning their captain to sail a longboat back to England. But the captain and his loyalists survive and ultimately return home eager to share their own version of events.
Bestseller David Grann, author of Killers of the Flower Moon, delivers another page-turning story you probably didn’t hear about in history class. His careful research shines with frequent direct quotes pulled from first-hand accounts, newspaper articles, and court documents from the time, but The Wager remains highly readable throughout. It moves along at a fast clip, and at only 329 pages, it’s much less of a tome than many nonfiction history reads. Part naval history, part survival story, and part courtroom drama, this is a vivid retelling of a fascinating moment in time.
If you like The Wager, you might also like:
by Hampton Sides
Doubleday, 2024. 308 pages. Nonfiction
Doubleday, 2024. 308 pages. Nonfiction
On July 12th, 1776, Captain James Cook, already lionized as the greatest explorer in British history, set off on his third voyage in his ship the HMS Resolution. Two-and-a-half years later, on a beach on the island of Hawaii, Cook was killed in a conflict with native Hawaiians. How did Cook, who was unique among captains for his respect for Indigenous peoples and cultures, come to that fatal moment? Hampton Sides' bravura account of Cook's last journey both wrestles with Cook's legacy and provides a thrilling narrative of the titanic efforts and continual danger that characterized exploration in the 1700s. At once a ferociously-paced story of adventure on the high seas and a searching examination of the complexities and consequences of the Age of Exploration, The Wide Wide Sea is a major work from one of our finest narrative nonfiction writers
by Erik Larsen
Crown, 2024. 565 pages. Nonfiction
On November 6, 1860, Abraham Lincoln became the fluky victor in a tight race for president. The country was bitterly at odds; Southern extremists were moving ever closer to destroying the Union, with one state after another seceding and Lincoln powerless to stop them. Slavery fueled the conflict, but somehow the passions of North and South came to focus on a lonely federal fortress in Charleston Harbor: Fort Sumter. In the middle of it all is the overwhelmed Lincoln, battling with his duplicitous secretary of state, William Seward, as he tries desperately to avert a war that he fears is inevitable--one that will eventually kill 750,000 Americans. Drawing on diaries, secret communiques, slave ledgers, and plantation records, Larson gives us a political horror story that captures the forces that led America to the brink - a dark reminder that we often don't see a cataclysm coming until it's too late.
SGR
