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Sea of Poppies: A Novel
Shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize At the heart of this vibrant saga is a vast ship, the Ibis. Its destiny is a tumultuous voyage across the Indian Ocean; its purpose, to fight China’s vicious nineteenth-century Opium Wars. As for the crew, they are a motley array of sailors and stowaways, coolies and convicts. In a time of colonial upheaval, fate has thrown together a diverse cast of Indians and Westerners, from a bankrupt raja to a widowed tribeswoman, from a mulatto American freedman to a freespirited French orphan. As their old family ties are washed away, they, like their historical counterparts, come to view themselves as jahaj-bhais, or ship-brothers. An unlikely dynasty is born, which will span continents, races, and generations. The vast sweep of this historical adventure spans the lush poppy fields of the Ganges, the rolling high seas, the exotic backstreets of Canton. But it is the panorama of characters, whose diaspora encapsulates the vexed colonial history of the East itself, that makes Sea of Poppies so breathtakingly alive—a masterpiece from one of the world’s finest novelists. .
Price: $16.85
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Oliver's Surprise: A Boy, a Schooner and the Great Hurricane of 1938
Longing to feel closer to his favorite grandfather, Oliver skips school on a sparkling September afternoon and hides out on a tired schooner When he wakes up on the ways of his grandfather's boatyard and realizes he's been transported back to 1938, he must decide what to do before the dangerous hurricane he'd been studying in school hits. While the main character is a 12 year old boy, Oliver's story, and the story of a powerful weather event that still reverberates along the east coast, is more than appropriate for an adult audience. Written by an Olympic medalist on the 2004 USA sailing team, this charming story includes 8 original illustrations, a glossary of nautical terms and a short history of the Great Hurricane of 1938 that devastated the eastern seaboard. September 2008 marks the 70th anniversary of the storm..
Price: $8.51
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Amistad: A Novel Based on the Screenplay
Based on the true story of the 1839 mutiny on board the Spanish slave ship, Amistad, here is the frightening sequence of events that led fifty-three young men and women - and one young nation - to seek freedom and justice for all people. Amistad is the story of Cinque, the illegally enslaved son of a Mende chief who led an uprising full of fury and courage. It is also the story of John Quincy Adams, the former American president, who reluctantly heeded the call to justice and defended Cinque in a Supreme Court trial that would alter the nation's history. And it is the story of men and women searching to find truth and to uphold the basic tenets of the American Constitution. Brilliantly narrated by award-winning novelist Alexs Pate, Amistad celebrates the human spirit's profound determination to fight, hope, and to be free. Visit the Amistad book site! A junior novelization is also available for young adults. .
Price: $2.78
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The Ship and the Storm
"Utterly compulsive and unputdownable--the most exciting, authentic, and humanly moving of all the recent Storm books. Brilliantly paced and perfectly balanced. . . . Carrier is a marvelously trustworthy narrator. . . . A terrific book."--Jonathan Raban, author of Passage to Juneau: A Sea and Its Meanings and Bad Land: An American Romance "A wonderful story. An extremely well-written account of the events as I knew them. I commend Jim Carrier for a magnificent job."--Jerry D. Jarrell, Director, National Hurricane Center In October 1998, the majestic schooner Fantome came face-to-face with one of the most savage storms in Atlantic history. The last days of the Fantome are reconstructed in vivid and heartbreaking detail through Jim Carrier's extensive research and hundreds of personal interviews. What emerges is a story of courage, hubris, the agony of command, the weight of lives versus wealth, and the advances of science versus the terrible power and unpredictability of nature..
Price: $13.72
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Pete Culler on Wooden Boats
The insights and wisdom of the late, great boat designer and builder Renowned as one of the last and best of the old-time boatbuilders, Captain R. D.“Pete” Culler provided a guiding light for the wooden boat revival in the 1970s. His designs are classic melds of elegance and utility; his workmanship was akin to artistry; and his teaching and writing a blend of clarity, good sense, insight, and humor. This book brings together the complete texts of Culler’s classic works Boats, Oars, and Rowing and Skiffs & Schooners, along with articles from The Mariner’s Catalogs and a selection of his timeless boat designs. .
Price: $16.36
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Our Lady of the Artichokes and Other Portuguese-American Stories (Prairie Schooner Book Prize in Fiction)
The stories in this prize-winning collection evoke a complete world, one so richly imagined and finely realized that the stories themselves are not so much read as experienced. The world of these stories is Portuguese-American, redolent of incense and spices, resonant with ritual and prayer, immersed in the California culture of freeway and commerce. Lacked with lyrical prose and vivid detail, acclaimed writer Katherine Vaz conjures a captivating blend of Old World heritage and New World culture to explore the links between families, friends, strangers, and their world. From the threat of a serial killer as the background for a young girl’s first brush with death to the fallout of a modern-day visitation from the Virgin Mary; from an AIDS-stricken squatter refusing to vacate an empty Lisbon home to a mother’s yearlong struggle with the death of her synesthetic daughter, these deft stories make their world ours. (20080811).
Price: $10.90
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Famous (Prairie Schooner Book Prize in Poetry)
She “became famous, finally, to herself,” Kathleen Flenniken writes. This is the kind of fame at the heart of most lives and at the center of Flenniken’s first collection, the winner of the Prairie Schooner Book Prize in Poetry. Here “a little voice sings / from the back of the auditorium / of my throat. Aren’t all of us / waiting to be discovered?” The poet’s answer is sometimes grave, sometimes comic, but always tuned to the incidental music of daily life. .
Price: $11.28
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Notes for My Body Double (Prairie Schooner Book Prize in Poetry)
Who would guess that Godzilla, the Invisible Man, Elvis, Donald Duck, Ted Williams, and the Three Stooges might have something to say about the love and loss that shape the way we see the world? And yet these are the pop-culture coordinates that chart the emotional life brilliantly mapped out in Paul Guest’s second book of poems. Winner of the Prairie Schooner Prize in Poetry, this collection plumbs the depths of nature and culture (how, for instance, “gar” in Old English means “spear,” and an octopus can lose a limb during mating) to give form to the darkness and the light that make us human. In poetry whose tone is largely one of lament tempered by a wry and intelligent humor, Paul Guest does what a poet does best: he gives us the moments of his life refashioned to reflect the larger arc and meaning of our own—of life, that is, writ large. (20070402).
Price: $11.29
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The American Fishing Schooners: 1825-1935
The evolution of the American fishing schooner from the 18th century to the last working and racing schooners of the mid-1930s is recounted in this book. The designers, builders and crews are discussed, and 137 plans of schooners show graphically the development of the type. An important feature of the book is its illustrated glossary-appendix, which covers items of hull construction and equipment, rigging and gear, colour and carving, and includes notes by the builders and riggers themselves..
Price: $36.00
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A Race for Real Sailors: The Bluenose And the International Fishermen's Cup, 1920-1938
In the summer of 1920, many Canadian fishermen following the America's Cup series were frustrated. Every time the wind breezed up, the organizers called off the race. These are contests for men in whites and boats with tender hulls, they muttered in the taverns of Halifax and Lunenburg. Why not show these fancy yachtsmen what the last of the working schooners, manned by genuine salts, can do? A Nova Scotia newspaper donated a trophy and threw down the gauntlet to the seamen of New England, challenging them to meet the Maritimes' best in a "race for real sailors." And so the International Fishermen's Cup was born. Exhaustively researched in archives in both the U. S. and Canada, A Race for Real Sailors is a vibrant history of the Fishermen's Cup series, which dominated sporting headlines between the two world wars. Here are the incidents and drama of each race and the almost living personalities of the schooners that contested them: the Delawana and the Esperanto, the Columbia and the Gertrude L. Thebaud, and dominating them all the Bluenose, the big brute from Lunenburg whose image shines on the Canadian dime to this day. Vying for the spotlight are the boats' larger-than-life skippers, among them Marty Welch, the hard-charging American who first took the cup; Ben Pine, the Gloucester scrap dealer whose passion kept the races afloat when they seemed destined to fade away; and the irascible, impossible Angus Walters, master of the Bluenose,who repeatedly broke American hearts but whose own heart was broken by Canada's refusal to come to the rescue of his beloved vessel. The stirring and poignant tale is illustrated with 51 historical photographs and five maps, and rounded out by a glossary of sailing terms and an appendix of the ever-changing race rules. This is a story that will keep even confirmed landlubbers pegged to their seats, a tale of iron men and wooden ships whose time will never come again..
Price: $14.95
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