Ninety Percent of Everything: Inside Shipping, the Invisible Industry That Puts Clothes on Your Back, Gas in Your Car, and Food on Your Plate

Looking for a Ship

John McPhee · 247 pages

This is an extraordinary tale of life on the high seas aboard one of the last American merchant ships, the S.S. Stella Lykes, on a forty-two-day journey from Charleston down the Pacific coast of South America. As the crew of the Stella Lykes makes their ocean voyage, they tell stories of other runs and other ships, tales of disaster, stupidity, greed, generosity, and courage.

Moby-Duck: The True Story of 28,800 Bath Toys Lost at Sea and of the Beachcombers, Oceanographers, Environmentalists, and Fools, Including the Author, Who Went in Search of Them

Donovan Hohn · 402 pages

When the writer Donovan Hohn heard of the mysterious loss of thousands of bath toys at sea, he figured he would interview a few oceanographers, talk to a few beachcombers, and read up on Arctic science and geography. But questions can be like ocean currents: wade in too far, and they carry you away. Hohn's accidental odyssey pulls him into the secretive world of shipping conglomerates, the daring

Pirate Hunters: Treasure, Obsession, and the Search for a Legendary Pirate Ship

Robert Kurson · 304 pages

Traces the high-stakes quest of John Mattera and Shadow Divers' Chatterton to find the lost pirate ship of Joseph Bannister, discussing their teamwork with technology-eschewing Tracy Bowden and the story behind Bannister's elusive treasure.

The Story of a Shipwrecked Sailor

Gabriel Garcia Marquez · 106 pages

In 1955, Garcia Marquez was working for El Espectador, a newspaper in Bogota, when in February of that year eight crew members of the Caldas, a Colombian destroyer, were washed overboard and disappeared. Ten days later one of them turned up, barely alive, on a deserted beach in northern Colombia. This book, which originally appeared as a series of newspaper articles, is Garcia Marquez's account of

438 Days: An Extraordinary True Story of Survival at Sea

Jonathan Franklin · 319 pages

"The miraculous account of the man who survived alone and adrift at sea longer than anyone in recorded history--as told to journalist Jonathan Franklin in dozens of exclusive interviews"--

The Strange Last Voyage of Donald Crowhurst

Nicholas Tomalin, Ron Hall · 317 pages

"In early 1968, desperate entrepreneur Donald Crowhurst was trying to sell a nautical navigation device he had developed when he saw that the Sunday Times would be sponsoring the Golden Globe Race, the first ever solo, round-the-world sailing competition. An avid amateur sailor, Crowhurst sensed a marketing opportunity and shocked the world by entering the competition using an untested trimaran of

China's Second Continent: How a Million Migrants Are Building a New Empire in Africa

Howard W. French · 304 pages

A Marriage At Sea

Sophie Elmhirst

In 1972, an incident with a breaching whale turns a couple’s dream of sailing on a boat into a monthslong struggle for survival on a raft.

Working on the Edge: Surviving In the World's Most Dangerous Profession: King Crab Fishing on Alaska's High Seas

Spike Walker · 279 pages

Neptune's Fortune: The Billion-Dollar Shipwreck and the Ghosts of the Spanish Empire

Julian Sancton · 384 pages

Ghost Ship: The Mysterious True Story of the Mary Celeste and Her Missing Crew

Brian Hicks · 304 pages

Overbooked: The Exploding Business of Travel and Tourism

Elizabeth Becker · 456 pages

Travel is no longer a past-time but a colossal industry, arguably one of the biggest in the world and second only to oil in importance for many poor countries. One out of twelve people in the world are employed by the tourism industry which contributes $6.5 trillion to the world's economy. To investigate the size and effect of this new industry, the author traveled the globe. She speaks to the Min

Overboard!: A True Blue-water Odyssey of Disaster and Survival

Michael Tougias · 212 pages

Junkyard Planet: Travels in the Billion-Dollar Trash Trade

Adam Minter · 284 pages

"When you drop your Diet Coke can or yesterday's newspaper in the recycling bin, where does it go? Probably halfway around the world, to people and places that clean up what you don't want and turn it into something you can't wait to buy. In Junkyard Planet, Adam Minter-- veteran journalist and son of an American junkyard owner-- travels deeply into a vast, often hidden, multibillion-dollar indust

The Ice Master

Jennifer Niven · 402 pages

It was to be the greatest and most elaborate Arctic expedition in history, with the largest scientific staff ever taken on such a journey. It's leader, Vilhjalmur Stefansson, was celebrated for his studies of Eskimo life and, with this mission, hoped to find evidence that proved his staunchly held belief that there was a last unexplored continent, hidden beneath the vast polar ice cap. In June 191

In the Kingdom of Ice: The Grand and Terrible Polar Voyage of the USS Jeannette

Hampton Sides · 480 pages

A dramatic account of the ill-fated 19th-century naval expedition to the North Pole cites the contributions of German cartographer August Peterman, New York Herald owner James Gordon Bennett and famed naval officer George Washington De Long in the team's efforts to survive brutal environmental conditions.

Dead Wake: The Last Crossing of the Lusitania

Erik Larson · 464 pages

It is a story that many of us think we know but don't, and Erik Larson tells it thrillingly, switching between hunter and hunted while painting a larger portrait of America at the height of the Progressive Era. Full of glamour and suspense, Dead Wake brings to life a cast of evocative characters, from famed Boston bookseller Charles Lauriat to pioneering female architect Theodate Pope to President

The Perfect Storm: A True Story of Men Against the Sea

Sebastian Junger · 256 pages

It was the storm of the century, boasting waves over one hundred feet high --- a tempest created by so rare a combination of factors that meteorologists deemed it "the perfect storm." When it struck in October 1991, there was a virtually no warning. "She's comin; on, boys, and she's comin' on strong." radioed Captain Billy Tyne of the Andrew Gail off the coast of Nova Scotia, and soon afterward th

Swimming With Sharks: My Journey into the World of the Bankers

Joris Luyendijk · 288 pages

The Optician of Lampedusa

Emma Jane Kirby · 115 pages

From an award-winning BBC journalist, this moving book turns the testimony of an accidental hero into a timeless story about the awakening of human courage and conscience. 'I can hardly begin to describe to you what I saw as our boat approached the source of that terrible noise. I hardly want to. You won't understand because you weren't there. You can't understand. You see, I thought I'd heard sea

Crude World: The Violent Twilight of Oil

Peter Maass · 276 pages

Oil is the substance that allows our world to work. Over the course of a century it has taken on such a variety of functions that even a small decrease in oil output would cause economic chaos and nightmarish shortages. We know, of course, that this reliance is a disaster but what we are perhaps less clear about is the terrible damage done by oil to those countries that produce it: the people who

The Secret Life of Groceries: The Dark Miracle of the American Supermarket

Benjamin Lorr · 328 pages

Bait and Switch: The (Futile) Pursuit of the American Dream

Barbara Ehrenreich · 248 pages

"Barbara Ehrenreich's Nickel and Dimed explored the lives of low-wage workers. Now, in Bait and Switch, she enters another hidden realm of the economy: the shadowy world of the white-collar unemployed." "Bait and Switch highlights the people who've done everything right - gotten college degrees, developed marketable skills, and built up impressive resumes - yet have become repeatedly vulnerable t

Overdressed: The Shockingly High Cost of Cheap Fashion

Elizabeth L. Cline · 258 pages

Evaluates the costs of low-priced clothing while tracing the author's own transformation to a conscientious shopper, a journey during which she visited a garment factory, learned to resole shoes, and shopped for local, sustainable clothing.