Author:
Publisher: BRILL
ISBN: 9004487891
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 308

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Author: Callum Roberts
Publisher: Island Press
ISBN: 1597265772
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 615

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Humanity can make short work of the oceans’ creatures. In 1741, hungry explorers discovered herds of Steller’s sea cow in the Bering Strait, and in less than thirty years, the amiable beast had been harpooned into extinction. It’s a classic story, but a key fact is often omitted. Bering Island was the last redoubt of a species that had been decimated by hunting and habitat loss years before the explorers set sail. As Callum M. Roberts reveals in The Unnatural History of the Sea, the oceans’ bounty didn’t disappear overnight. While today’s fishing industry is ruthlessly efficient, intense exploitation began not in the modern era, or even with the dawn of industrialization, but in the eleventh century in medieval Europe. Roberts explores this long and colorful history of commercial fishing, taking readers around the world and through the centuries to witness the transformation of the seas. Drawing on firsthand accounts of early explorers, pirates, merchants, fishers, and travelers, the book recreates the oceans of the past: waters teeming with whales, sea lions, sea otters, turtles, and giant fish. The abundance of marine life described by fifteenth century seafarers is almost unimaginable today, but Roberts both brings it alive and artfully traces its depletion. Collapsing fisheries, he shows, are simply the latest chapter in a long history of unfettered commercialization of the seas. The story does not end with an empty ocean. Instead, Roberts describes how we might restore the splendor and prosperity of the seas through smarter management of our resources and some simple restraint. From the coasts of Florida to New Zealand, marine reserves have fostered spectacular recovery of plants and animals to levels not seen in a century. They prove that history need not repeat itself: we can leave the oceans richer than we found them.

Author: Horace Beck
Publisher: Booksales
ISBN: 9780785811190
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 484

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Horace Beck, a former professor of American Literature at Middlebury College, has been gathering the sea's folklore for 70 years in Europe, North America, and the West Indies. This collection of legends, songs, superstitions, and stories, both true and apocryphal includes spectral ships, mermaids and mermen, pirates, sea language, sea monsters, navigation and weather lore, names on sea and shore, and much more. Library Journal called Folklore and the Sea "a browser's delight as well as a researcher's gold mine."

Author: Richard J. King
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 022651496X
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 449

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Although Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick is beloved as one of the most profound and enduring works of American fiction, we rarely consider it a work of nature writing—or even a novel of the sea. Yet Pulitzer Prize–winning author Annie Dillard avers Moby-Dick is the “best book ever written about nature,” and nearly the entirety of the story is set on the waves, with scarcely a whiff of land. In fact, Ishmael’s sea yarn is in conversation with the nature writing of Emerson and Thoreau, and Melville himself did much more than live for a year in a cabin beside a pond. He set sail: to the far remote Pacific Ocean, spending more than three years at sea before writing his masterpiece in 1851. A revelation for Moby-Dick devotees and neophytes alike, Ahab’s Rolling Sea is a chronological journey through the natural history of Melville’s novel. From white whales to whale intelligence, giant squids, barnacles, albatross, and sharks, Richard J. King examines what Melville knew from his own experiences and the sources available to a reader in the mid-1800s, exploring how and why Melville might have twisted what was known to serve his fiction. King then climbs to the crow’s nest, setting Melville in the context of the American perception of the ocean in 1851—at the very start of the Industrial Revolution and just before the publication of On the Origin of Species. King compares Ahab’s and Ishmael’s worldviews to how we see the ocean today: an expanse still immortal and sublime, but also in crisis. And although the concept of stewardship of the sea would have been entirely foreign, if not absurd, to Melville, King argues that Melville’s narrator Ishmael reveals his own tendencies toward what we would now call environmentalism. Featuring a coffer of illustrations and an array of interviews with contemporary scientists, fishers, and whale watch operators, Ahab’s Rolling Sea offers new insight not only into a cherished masterwork and its author but also into our evolving relationship with the briny deep—from whale hunters to climate refugees.

Author: James J. Bloom
Publisher: McFarland
ISBN: 9780786465255
Category : Adventure and adventurers in literature
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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For centuries, humankind has wondered what is ""out there"" and has embarked on countless voyages to find out. This book traces the history and literature of the imaginary voyage - stories of mariners journeying through uncharted waters to find strange and marvelous sights. Through the overlapping spheres of history, geography, cosmography and literary criticism, this book examines the mystique of what lies just over the horizon.

Author: Erin Morgenstern
Publisher: Anchor
ISBN: 0385541228
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 526

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NATIONAL BESTSELLER • From the bestselling author of The Night Circus, a timeless love story set in a secret underground world—a place of pirates, painters, lovers, liars, and ships that sail upon a starless sea. Zachary Ezra Rawlins is a graduate student in Vermont when he discovers a mysterious book hidden in the stacks. As he turns the pages, entranced by tales of lovelorn prisoners, key collectors, and nameless acolytes, he reads something strange: a story from his own childhood. Bewildered by this inexplicable book and desperate to make sense of how his own life came to be recorded, Zachary uncovers a series of clues—a bee, a key, and a sword—that lead him to a masquerade party in New York, to a secret club, and through a doorway to an ancient library hidden far below the surface of the earth. What Zachary finds in this curious place is more than just a buried home for books and their guardians—it is a place of lost cities and seas, lovers who pass notes under doors and across time, and of stories whispered by the dead. Zachary learns of those who have sacrificed much to protect this realm, relinquishing their sight and their tongues to preserve this archive, and also of those who are intent on its destruction. Together with Mirabel, a fierce, pink-haired protector of the place, and Dorian, a handsome, barefoot man with shifting alliances, Zachary travels the twisting tunnels, darkened stairwells, crowded ballrooms, and sweetly soaked shores of this magical world, discovering his purpose—in both the mysterious book and in his own life.

Author: James Stavridis
Publisher: Naval Institute Press
ISBN: 1682477169
Category : Education
Languages : en
Pages : 214

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Admiral Stavridis, a leader in military, international affairs, and national security circles, shares his love of the sea and some of the sources of that affection. The Sailor's Bookshelf offers synopses of fifty books that illustrate the history, importance, lore, and lifestyle of the oceans and of those who “go down to the sea in ships.” Stavridis colors those descriptions with glimpses of his own service—“sea stories” in popular parlance—that not only clarify his choices but show why he is held in such high esteem among his fellow sailors. ​Divided into four main categories—The Oceans, Explorers, Sailors in Fiction, and Sailors in Non-Fiction—Admiral Stavridis’ choices will appeal to “old salts” and to those who have never known the sights of the ever-changing seascape nor breathed the tonic of an ocean breeze. The result is a navigational aid that guides readers through the realm of sea literature, covering a spectrum of topics that range from science to aesthetics, from history to modernity, from solo sailing to great battles. ​Among these eclectic choices are guides to shiphandling and navigation, classic fiction that pits man against the sea, ecological and strategic challenges, celebrations of great achievements and the lessons that come with failure, economic competition and its stepbrother combat, explorations of the deep, and poetry that beats with the pulse of the wave. Some of the included titles are familiar to many, while others, are likely less well-known but are welcome additions to this encompassing collection. Admiral Stavridis has chosen some books that are relatively recent, and he recommends other works which have been around much longer and deserve recognition. ​

Author: Samantha Hunt
Publisher: Tin House Books
ISBN: 1941040969
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 178

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National Bestseller "The Seas took me back to how I felt as a kid, when you’re newly falling in love with literature, newly shocked by its capacity to cast a spell..." ?Maggie Nelson (from the Introduction) A Most Anticipated Book of Summer at BuzzFeed, NYLON, and more. Moored in a coastal fishing town so far north that the highways only run south, the unnamed narrator of The Seas is a misfit. She’s often the subject of cruel local gossip. Her father, a sailor, walked into the ocean eleven years earlier and never returned, leaving his wife and daughter to keep a forlorn vigil. Surrounded by water and beckoned by the sea, she clings to what her father once told her: that she is a mermaid. True to myth, she finds herself in hard love with a land-bound man, an Iraq War veteran thirteen years her senior.The mesmerizing, fevered coming-of-age tale that follows will land her in jail. Her otherworldly escape will become the stuff of legend. With the inventive brilliance and psychological insight that have earned her international acclaim, Samantha Hunt pulls readers into an undertow of impossible love and intoxication, blurring the lines between reality and fairy tale, hope and delusion, sanity and madness.

Author: Mauricio Obregon
Publisher: Modern Library
ISBN: 0375506810
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 146

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The story of Jason and the Argonauts and Homer's tales of Ulysses' wanderings are among the greatest of the ancient epics, but they are not merely fiction. Following the clues in the classical texts, Mauricio Obregón here maps the likely routes of these adventurers and reveals the remaining traces of the things and places they describe, re-creating the geographical discovery of the ancient world. Obregón takes us with him on his reenactments of the hazardous adventures of Jason, sailing east along the coast of the Black Sea, and of Ulysses, sailing clockwise around the Mediterranean. These voyages map the two major seas of the ancient era and help us understand how the Greeks viewed their world — including the many startling deductions they were able to make about it (such as the circumference of the earth) from what today seems like limited knowledge. Obregón has also traced the voyages depicted in the Norse legends, followed adventurous Muslims on southern journeys, and emulated the Polynesians who managed to traverse the seemingly limitless Pacific. He scrutinizes every detail of sailing in ancient times, such as the mechanics of navigation: The stars, for example, which the mariners took as their guides, were not in the positions that we see them in today, a crucial fact in re-creating past voyages. This wonderful book contains more than forty drawings and photographs, including depictions of the explorers' ships based on the descriptions in the literature that has come down to us, the facts hidden in the fiction, from ancient times.

Author: Philip Marsden
Publisher:
ISBN: 9781783783007
Category : Summer Isles (Scotland)
Languages : en
Pages : 352

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Book Description
A journey by sea along the western coasts of Ireland and Scotland in search of islands, both real and imagined.