On the final day of the 2002 / 2003 football season Chelsea Football Club recorded a famous 2-1 victory over Liverpool, thereby qualifying to play in the following seasons European Champions League competition. Resigned to losing Gianfranco Zola, who had recently been voted the club's greatest ever player, and with no money available for Chelsea's charismatic coach Claudio Ranieri to strengthen the squad, the prospects for the coming season looked to be self-limiting. That had been the general consensus of Marco, Young Dave, Ugly John, Ossie and the rest of the Chelsea Gate 17 boys as they frittered away the summer months waiting for the new European campaign to begin. Enter Roman Abramovich. The billionaire Russian oligarch purchased the club and financed a spending spree unprecedented in the history of the game. 'Glorious unpredictability,' that's what Marco called it ...that Chelsea factor, you just never knew what was going to happen next. Whatever it was, the Gate 17 boys had no intention of missing any of it ...they'd even planned to make a spiritual pilgrimage to Sardinia to watch their hero Zola. Over Land and Sea re-writes the current trend in depressingly violent football literature.

Chelsea Football Club had only been in existence for nine years when war was declared in 1914, but it already formed a vibrant new part of the community. At home they participated in their first FA Cup Final (dubbed the "Khaki FA Cup Final") in 1915, held recruitment drives at matches, debated over whether the league should continue in a time of war, and proudly published letters sent back to the club from the front. At the onset, 50 soccer balls were sent to fans who were regulars in the forces, or men who had scrambled to enlist. More fans followed them and tried to form companies of Chelsea fans in their battalions. Players joined up and left, most of them for the Footballers Battalion. Exchanging one game for another, they put aside their club differences and fought side by side with men from rival teams.

During the vast stretches of early geologic time, the islands of the Caribbean archipelago separated from continental land masses, rose and sank many times, merged with and broke from other land masses, and then by the mid-Cenozoic period settled into the current pattern known today. By the time Native Americans arrived, the islands had developed complex, stable ecosystems. The actions these first colonists took on the landscape—timber clearing, cultivation, animal hunting and domestication, fishing and exploitation of reef species—affected fragile land and sea biotic communities in both beneficial and harmful ways. On Land and Sea examines the condition of biosystems on Caribbean islands at the time of colonization, human interactions with those systems through time, and the current state of biological resources in the West Indies. Drawing on a massive data set collected from long-term archaeological research, the study reconstructs past lifeways on these small tropical islands. The work presents a wide range of information, including types of fuel and construction timber used by inhabitants, cooking techniques for various shellfish, availability and use of medicinal and ritual plants, the effects on native plants and animals of cultivation and domestication, and diet and nutrition of native populations. The islands of the Caribbean basin continue to be actively excavated and studied in the quest to understand the earliest human inhabitants of the New World. This comprehensive work will ground current and future studies and will be valuable to archaeologists, anthropologists, botanists, ecologists, Caribbeanists, Latin American historians, and anyone studying similar island environments.

Set in a small coastal town in North Carolina during the waning years of the American Revolution, this incandescent debut novel follows three generations of family—fathers and daughters, mother and son, master and slave, characters who yearn for redemption amidst a heady brew of war, kidnapping, slavery, and love. Drawn to the ocean, ten-year-old Tabitha wanders the marshes of her small coastal village and listens to her father’s stories about his pirate voyages and the mother she never knew. Since the loss of his wife Helen, John has remained land-bound for their daughter, but when Tab contracts yellow fever, he turns to the sea once more. Desperate to save his daughter, he takes her aboard a sloop bound for Bermuda, hoping the salt air will heal her. Years before, Helen herself was raised by a widowed father. Asa, the devout owner of a small plantation, gives his daughter a young slave named Moll for her tenth birthday. Left largely on their own, Helen and Moll develop a close but uneasy companionship. Helen gradually takes over the running of the plantation as the girls grow up, but when she meets John, the pirate turned Continental soldier, she flouts convention and her father’s wishes by falling in love. Moll, meanwhile, is forced into marriage with a stranger. Her only solace is her son, Davy, whom she will protect with a passion that defies the bounds of slavery. In this elegant, evocative, and haunting debut, Katy Simpson Smith captures the singular love between parent and child, the devastation of love lost, and the lonely paths we travel in the name of renewal.

An illustrated history of the wonderful and curious things of nature existing before and since the deluge being a natural history of the sea illustrated by stirring adventures with whales also a natural history of land-creatures.