Overview

In Left for Dead, Eric Jay Dolin--""one of today's finest writers about ships and the sea"" (American Heritage)--tells the true story of a wild and fateful encounter between an American sealing vessel, a shipwrecked British brig, and a British warship in the Falkland archipelago during the War of 1812.Fraught with misunderstandings and mistrust, the incident left three British sailors and two Americans, including the captain of the sealer, Charles H. Barnard, abandoned in the barren, windswept, and inhospitable Falklands for a year and a half. With deft narrative skill and unequaled knowledge of the very pith of the seafaring life, Dolin describes in vivid and harrowing detail the increasingly desperate existence of the castaways during their eighteen-month ordeal--an all-too-common fate in the Great Age of Sail. A tale of intriguing complexity, with surprising twists and turns throughout--involving greed, lying, bullying, a hostile takeover, stellar leadership, ingenuity, severe privation, endurance, banishment, the great value of a dog, the birth of a baby, a perilous thousand-mile open-ocean journey in a seventeen-foot boat, an improbable rescue mission, and legal battles over a dubious and disgraceful wartime prize--Left for Dead shows individuals in wartime under great duress acting both nobly and atrociously, and offers a unique perspective on a pivotal era in American maritime history. ""An absorbing adventure that explores the dark shadows of instinct and self-preservation, and the hardships and stress that stretch the bonds of humanity. Fascinating reading.""--Stephen R. Bown, author of Island of the Blue Foxes: Disaster and Triumph on the World's Greatest Scientific Expedition

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9798874719197

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Reviews

""An absorbing adventure that explores the dark shadows of instinct and self-preservation, and the hardships and stress that stretch the bonds of humanity. Fascinating reading."" -- ""Stephen R. Bown, author of Island of the Blue Foxes""

Author Information

Eric Jay Dolin is the author of numerous works in maritime history, including Leviathan: The History of Whaling in America, which was chosen as one of the best nonfiction books of 2007 by the Los Angeles Times and the Boston Globe. It also won the 2007 John Lyman Award for US Maritime History. He is a graduate of Brown, Yale, and MIT, where he received his PhD in environmental policy. L. J. Ganser is a multiple Audie Award-winning narrator with over six hundred titles recorded to date. Prized for versatility, his work ranges from preschool books to crime noir thrillers, from astronomical adventures in both science and science fiction, to Arctic Circle high school basketball stories. He lives in New York City with his family and dog, Mars.

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