Iowa City Public Library | Virtual Branch

Featured Collections On the shelf & ready to reserve

Ease into summer--Enjoy something upbeat and laidback

Telling tails : a Second Chance cat mystery

Grow cook eat : a food lover's guide to kitchen gardening, including 50 recipes, plus harvesting and storage tips

The wildlife-friendly vegetable gardener : how to grow food in harmony with nature

Small plot, high yield gardening : grow like a pro, save money, and eat well from your front (or back or side) yard 100% organic produce garden

Lasagna gardening : a new layering system for bountiful gardens : no digging, no tilling, no weeding, no kidding!

Midwest fruit & vegetable gardening : plant, grow, and harvest the best edibles

Growing perfect vegetables : a visual guide to raising and harvesting prime garden produce

The vegetable gardener's bible : discover Ed's high-yield W-O-R-D system for all North American gardening regions

Incredible vegetables from self-watering containers

Gardening for everyone : growing vegetables, herbs, and more at home

Fresh from the garden : an organic guide to growing vegetables, berries, and herbs in cold climates

The doable off-grid homestead : cultivating a simple life by hand ... on a budget

How to build, maintain, and use a compost system : secrets and techniques you need to know to grow the best vegetables

200 vegetable-growing basics / Hamlyn All Color.

The four season farm gardener's cookbook : from the garden to the table in 120 recipes

Designing the new kitchen garden : an American potager handbook

Grow more food : a vegetable gardener's guide to getting the biggest harvest possible from a space of any size

Homegrown : illustrated bites from your garden to your table

Market farming success : the business of growing and selling local food

Quarter-acre farm : how I kept the patio, lost the lawn and fed my family for a year

The winter harvest handbook : year-round vegetable production using deep-organic techniques and unheated greenhouses

The weekend homesteader : a twelve-month guide to self-sufficiency

Because the only "summer slide" around here should be on a playground

Miles Morales : stranger tides : a Spider-Man graphic novel

I survived the shark attacks of 1916 : the graphic novel

More featured collections

Events

Preschool Stories & More: The Songs of Peter Rabbit

June 1, 2023 - 10:30am

How to Find a Good Book

June 1, 2023 - 12:00pm

Ebooks from the Library

June 2, 2023 - 10:30am

ABC Saturday (Arts, Books, & Children) at the Iowa Arts Festival

June 3, 2023 - 11:00am

ICPL Recommends

Awaken your genius : escape conformity, ignite creativity, and become extraordinary book cover

Breadsong : how baking changed our lives book cover

Cork dork : a wine-fueled adventure among the obsessive sommeliers, big bottle hunters, and rogue scientists who taught me to live for taste book cover

The Wager : a tale of shipwreck, mutiny and murder

David Grann

910.9164 /Grann
Literary Nonfiction, Nonfiction, History

"From the #1 New York Times bestselling author of Killers of the Flower Moon and The Lost City of Z, a mesmerizing story of shipwreck, survival, and savagery, culminating in a court martial that reveals a shocking truth 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 2500 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 had a very different story to tell. 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 captain 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. Most powerfully, he unearths the deeper meaning of the events, showing that it was not only the Wager's captain and crew who were on trial - it was the very idea of empire"--

I actually bought my own copy of this book because I just couldn't wait...it was worth the splurge! It's no secret that I'm already a fan of David Grann's writing, so it should come as no surprise that I'm loving this book. It's not even like seafaring and wrecks are my thing, but the way he writes about it, they might as well be. The story comes alive, through the details of the souls on board the ships and everything they went through, their dreams, emotions, fears, and actions. The ships and the environments even become characters of a sort in the story, as they have their own powers over the fates of everyone on board and waiting at home. Thrilling history here! -Candice