'One of the best books ever written about sailing'Time27,000 miles, three and a half to five months alone at sea, chilling casualty rates, the unrelenting strain of handling 60-foot boats day and night, the absolute certainty of weather and waves that could destroy them.On 3 November 1996 sixteen sailors set out from the Bay of Biscay to embark on the Vendee Globe - a single-handed yacht race through the world's most treacherous and...

"The periphery of a place can tell us a great deal about its heartland. along the edge of a nation's territory, its real prejudices, fears and obsessions - but also its virtues - irrepressibly bubble up as its people confront the 'other' whom they admire, or fear, or hold in contempt, and know little about. September 11, 2001, changed the United States utterly and nothing more so than the physical reality, the perception - and the meaning - of its borders."-from Borderlands

When, as a young man in the 1880s, Benjamin Lundy signed up for duty aboard a square-rigged commercial sailing vessel, he began a journey more exciting, and more terrifying, than he could have ever imagined: a treacherous, white-knuckle passage around that notorious "graveyard of ships," Cape Horn.A century later, Derek Lundy, author of the bestselling Godforsaken Sea and an accomplished amateur seaman himself, set out to recount his forebear's journey. The Way of a Ship is a mesme...

Benjamin Lundy crossed oceans under sail in the late nineteenth century and over one hundred years later Derek Lundy, his great-great nephew, has re-created that journey. In The Way of a Ship he places Benjamin on board the Beara Head with a community of fellow seamen as they perform the exhausting and dangerous work of sailing a square-rigger across the Atlantic and round Cape Horn.Derek Lundy adorns his story of an extraordinary journey with a profound knowledge of the s...

In this remarkable book, Belfast-born Derek Lundy uses the lives of three of his ancestors as a prism through which to examine what memory and the selective plundering of history has made of the truth in Northern Ireland.In Ulster the name 'Lundy' is synonymous with 'traitor'. Robert Lundy was the Protestant governor of Londonderry in 1688, just before it came under siege by the Catholic Irish army of James II. Robert Lundy ordered the city's capitulation. Crying 'No Surrender', ha...

**NATIONAL BESTSELLERNew York Times Book Review • 100 Notable Books of 2022Best Books of 2022 — New Yorker, Kirkus ReviewsLonglisted for the Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence“I can only wish that, when I was that lonely college junior and was finishing Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee, I’d had Hämäläinen’s book at hand.” —David Treuer, The New Yorker“[T]he single best book I have ever read on Native American history.” ...

From the Trojan Horse to a photograph snapped in Vietnam, world history has been shaped as much by chance and error as by courage and heroism. Despite impossible odds, invincible armies fall in bitter defeat to weaker opponents. How and why does this happen? What decides the fate of battle? In this fascinating book, Erik Durschmied takes us through the major conflicts of history-from Agincourt to the Civil War, from Crimea to the Gulf War-and reveals how, in war, it is the improbable and t...

“A sweeping story, embracing developments in economics and science, philosophy and exploration, religion and politics. . . . Beautifully clear.”— John Lanchester, The New YorkerHailed as an “arresting” (Lawrence Klepp, New Criterion) account, Nature’s Mutiny chronicles the great climate crisis of the seventeenth century that totally transformed Europe’s social and political fabric. Best-selling historian Philipp Blom reveals how a new, ra...

With her virtuoso translation, classicist and bestselling author Caroline Alexander brings to life Homer’s timeless heroic tale of the Trojan War.Composed around 730 B.C., Homer’s Iliad recounts the events of a few momentous weeks in the protracted ten-year military war between the invading Achaeans, or Greeks, and the Trojans in their besieged city of Ilion. From the explosive confrontation between Achilles, the greatest warrior at Troy, and Agamemnon, th...

**PULITZER PRIZE WINNER • NATIONAL BESTSELLER • “A magisterial overview of a thousand years of Native American history” (The New York Review of Books), from the rise of ancient cities more than a thousand years ago to fights for sovereignty that continue todayWINNER OF THE BANCROFT PRIZE, THE CUNDILL HISTORY PRIZE, AND THE MARK LYNTON HISTORY PRIZE**Long before the colonization of North America, Indigenous Americans built diverse civilizations and adapted to a chan...

**Winner of the Phi Beta Kappa Ralph Waldo Emerson Award“[A]n incisive and captivating reassessment of prehistory . . . In lucid prose, Geroulanos unspools an enthralling and detailed history of the development of modern natural science. It’s a must-read.” —Publishers Weekly, starred review“An astute, powerfully rendered history of humanity.” —Kirkus Reviews, starred reviewAn eminent historian tells the story of how we came to obsess over the origi...

Pete Goss became a national and international hero when he rescued French yachtsman Raphael Dinelli as his boat sank beneath him in the round-the-world single-handed sailing race, the Vendee Globe, on Christmas Day 1996. In doing so Pete scuppered his own chances in the race but was awarded theLegion d'Honneur by France's president and made a friend for life in Dinelli.Close to the Wind is his own story of the race and its dramas, his revolutionary boat,Aqua Quorum, his thoughts and emotio...