Left for Dead, Eric Jay Dolin
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Left for Dead
Shipwreck, Treachery, and Survival at the Edge of the World

Author: Eric Jay Dolin

Narrator: L.J. Ganser

Unabridged: 7 hr 59 min

Format: Digital Audiobook Download

Publisher: Recorded Books

Published: 05/07/2024

Categories: Nonfiction, History, Wars


Synopsis

In Left for Dead, Eric Jay Dolin—“one of today’s finest writers about ships and the
sea” (American Heritage)—tells the true story of a wild and fateful encounter
between an American sealing vessel, a shipwrecked British brig, and a British
warship in the Falkland archipelago during the War of 1812.
Fraught with misunderstandings and mistrust, the incident left three British sailors
and two Americans, including the captain of the sealer, Charles H. Barnard,
abandoned in the barren, windswept, and inhospitable Falklands for a year and a
half. With deft narrative skill and unequaled knowledge of the very pith of the
seafaring life, Dolin describes in vivid and harrowing detail the increasingly
desperate existence of the castaways during their eighteen-month ordeal—an alltoo-common fate in the Great Age of Sail.
A tale of intriguing complexity, with surprising twists and turns throughout—
involving greed, lying, bullying, a hostile takeover, stellar leadership, ingenuity,
severe privation, endurance, banishment, the great value of a dog, the birth of a
baby, a perilous thousand-mile open-ocean journey in a seventeen-foot boat, an
improbable rescue mission, and legal battles over a dubious and disgraceful
wartime prize—Left for Dead shows individuals in wartime under great duress
acting both nobly and atrociously, and offers a unique perspective on a pivotal era
in American maritime history.
“An absorbing adventure that explores the dark shadows of instinct and self-preservation, and the hardships and stress that stretch the bonds of humanity.
Fascinating reading.”—Stephen R. Bown, author of Island of the Blue Foxes:
Disaster and Triumph on the World’s Greatest Scientific Expedition

Author Bio

Eric Jay Dolin is the author of fourteen books. His most recent is A Furious Sky: The Five-Hundred-Year History of America's Hurricanes, which received a number of accolades, including being chosen by the Washington Post as one of 50 Notable Works of Nonfiction in 2020, by Kirkus Reviews as one of the Best Nonfiction Books of 2020 (in addition to being a Kirkus Prize finalist), by the Library Journal and Booklist as one of the Best Science & Technology Books of 2020, and by the New York Times Book Review as an "Editor's Choice." His other books include Leviathan: The History of Whaling in America, which was chosen as one of the Best Nonfiction Books of 2007 by the Los Angeles Times and the Boston Globe, and also won the 2007 John Lyman Award for U.S. Maritime History; and Black Flags, Blue Waters: The Epic History of America's Most Notorious Pirates, which was chosen as a "Must-Read" book for 2019 by the Massachusetts Center for the Book, and was a finalist for the 2019 Julia Ward Howe Award given by the Boston Author's Club. A graduate of Brown, Yale, and MIT, where he received his PhD in environmental policy, Dolin lives in Marblehead, Massachusetts, with his family.

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