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Hardcover The Wager: A Tale of Shipwreck, Mutiny and Murder Book

ISBN: 0385534264

ISBN13: 9780385534260

The Wager: A Tale of Shipwreck, Mutiny and Murder

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Format: Paperback

Condition: Very Good

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Book Overview

#1 NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER - From the author of Killers of the Flower Moon, a page-turning story of shipwreck, survival, and savagery, culminating in a court martial that reveals a shocking truth. The powerful narrative reveals the deeper meaning of the events on The Wager, showing that it was not only the captain and crew who ended up on trial, but the very idea of empire.

A Best Book of the Year: The New York Times, The New Yorker, TIME, Smithsonian, NPR, Vulture, Kirkus Reviews

"Riveting...Reads like a thriller, tackling a multilayered history--and imperialism--with gusto." --Time

"A tour de force of narrative nonfiction." --The Wall Street Journal

On January 28, 1742, a ramshackle vessel of patched-together wood and cloth washed up on the coast of Brazil. Inside were thirty emaciated men, barely alive, and they had an extraordinary tale to tell. They were survivors of His Majesty's Ship the Wager, a British vessel that had left England in 1740 on a secret mission during an imperial war with Spain. While the Wager had been chasing a Spanish treasure-filled galleon known as "the prize of all the oceans," it had wrecked on a desolate island off the coast of Patagonia. The men, after being marooned for months and facing starvation, built the flimsy craft and sailed for more than a hundred days, traversing nearly 3,000 miles of storm-wracked seas. They were greeted as heroes.

But then ... six months later, another, even more decrepit craft landed on the coast of Chile. This boat contained just three castaways, and they told a very different story. The thirty sailors who landed in Brazil were not heroes - they were mutineers. The first group responded with countercharges of their own, of a tyrannical and murderous senior officer and his henchmen. It became clear that while stranded on the island the crew had fallen into anarchy, with warring factions fighting for dominion over the barren wilderness. As accusations of treachery and murder flew, the Admiralty convened a court martial to determine who was telling the truth. The stakes were life-and-death--for whomever the court found guilty could hang.

The Wager is a grand tale of human behavior at the extremes told by one of our greatest nonfiction writers. Grann's recreation of the hidden world on a British warship rivals the work of Patrick O'Brian, his portrayal of the castaways' desperate straits stands up to the classics of survival writing such as The Endurance, and his account of the court martial has the savvy of a Scott Turow thriller. As always with Grann's work, the incredible twists of the narrative hold the reader spellbound.

Customer Reviews

11 customer ratings | 6 reviews

Rated 5 stars
Excellent description of life onboad a warship

I'm not sure who the target audience of this book was, but I think the writer beautifully described life onboard a ship. I have been on 3 deployments, and one thing I've always thought was that somethings never change. The first few chapters describe the life of people onboard. The descriptions are eloquently romantic but also give no doubt about the arduous work and in the 1600s, mire survival. Even better is that the verbal...

4Report

Rated 1 stars
Boring. No suspense. No drama.

DNF. Made it to chapter 13.. Not as much a "tale" as it is a book report. One in which the author clearly had a word count to reach. Chapters 1-3, overall unimportant and what was possibly relevant could have been condensed down to a page. Obviously the author did his research, and you can feel it. Constantly pulling quotes from book after book that made it hard to get in any sort of flow for the "tale". Didn't care at...

0Report

Rated 3 stars
Well written, but dragged on.

As far as historical non fictional narratives go, The Wager was decent. Grann does a very good job at getting the reader engaged in the first few chapters, meanwhile in the back of your mind, you know what direction the book is going-especially as a book about a shipwreck. One could predict-without any prior knowledge of the story- how the majority of the story would play out, and unfortunately, that is what hurt the book...

8Report

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