Overview

A true story of the battered life of a foremast crewman, Two Years Before the Mast is Richard Henry Dana’s classic travel narrative, which inspired canonical works such as Moby Dick and Sailing Alone Around the World. As Rod Scher follows Dana (the Harvard dropout-turned-sailor) on his voyages around North America, he annotates Dana’s tale with critiques, compliments, tie-ins to today, and little-known facts about both the book and the milieu of Dana’s time.

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9781493075980

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Reviews

Rod Scher is an ideally informative and amiable companion as he follows Dana on his exciting and exhausting voyage—he places Dana fully in his time and place, offering historical and cultural contexts for the writer's experiences, observations, and expressions. Scher knows how to inspire a sense of historical imagination in his readers, without forgetting who we are now. Scher can be proud of his own achievement in bringing such factual detail and humane judgment to this edition. -- Stephen M. Buhler, Aaron Douglas Professor of English, University of Nebraska–Lincoln An enjoyable and fascinating look at a [classic]. The modern reader navigating Dana’s story is given a global view in retrospect, which adds much to Dana’s narrative and offers a glimpse of the views and opinions of that time and place. Scher’s The AnnotatedTwo Years Before the Mast takes a classic tome and repackages it with seafaring terms defined and historical references in place, thereby transforming it into a gripping tale for any avid sailor, history buff, or literary aficionado to enjoy. -- Patricia Wood, author of <i>Lottery</i> Rod Scher has done it again, this time with his brilliant annotation . . . . Scher’s annotation reopened this classic for me. This is a careful and thoughtful work, never dry and often with a subtle twist of humor, yet always sensitive to Dana’s themes. Reading this annotation brings young Dana’s chronicle into sharp, poignant relief in an almost new and very exciting way. -- E. Michael Jackson, USCG Master Mariner and boating instructor

Author Information

Rod Scher is an experienced writer and editor with multiple books and dozens of magazine articles to his credit. The former editor of Smart Computing Magazine, Scher is also the author of Sailing by Starlight: The Remarkable Voyage of Globe Star and Leveling the Playing Field: The Democratization of Technology, and the editor/annotator of recent editions of Joshua Slocum’s classic nautical memoir Sailing Alone Around the World and Richard Henry Dana’s classic Two Years Before the Mast, all from Sheridan House Publishers. He lives in Depoe Bay, Oregon.

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