Let's journey back to the year of 1928 when a little boy was born near the beginning of the Great Depression. As he grew older, he saw that he had nothing and no way out of this situation. One summer, he decided to go into the Navy. However, there were some obstacles standing in his way. The first one was his age, which he couldn't truly do anything about, at least legally. The other was his mother. He needed her on his side. Come along to discover what happens next. What will he do about his age if anything? What about his mother? Read on to see how he overcomes these, and follow his adventures. You never know where he will take you.

"It was the sea that made me begin thinking secretly about love more than anything else; you know, a love worth dying for, or a love that consumes you. To a man locked up in a steel ship all the time, the sea is too much like a woman... Things like her lulls and storms, or her caprice... are all obvious." The Sailor Who Fell from Grace with the Sea tells the tale of a band of savage thirteen-year-old boys who reject the adult world as illusory, hypocritical and sentimental, and train themselves in a brutal callousness they call "objectivity." When the mother of one of them begins an affair with a ship's officer, he and his friends idealize the man at first; but it is not long before they conclude that he is in fact soft and romantic. They regard their disappointment in him as an act of betrayal on his part, and react violently.

Solo sailors are widely known to be a breed apart, and here's an unforgettable book that shows just how wide a berth they give themselves from the crowds. Several years ago, Miles Hordern, a schoolteacher by training---though he had run away to sea a few times before---set sail on a twenty-eight-foot boat from New Zealand to South America, the largest uninterrupted stretch of water on earth, and into the dominion of icebergs, cyclones, and swells of monumental proportions. The trip would take him through the fjords of Patagonia, one of the last uncharted areas in the world, then north on the Peru Current before he began his homeward voyage. Sailing the Pacific recounts that trip in prose so vivid you can almost feel the spray sting your face and the deck heave beneath your feet. Here is prose so hawser-taut that it takes you back to Conrad, Melville, and Poe, indeed all those writers whose works about the bounding main have launched countless imaginations. Hordern pauses to consider those who have gone before him, recounting the stories that have given life to this lonely and magisterial part of the world. Writers, adventurers, fictional characters, cartographers, doomed voyages from history's pages—from the Whaleship S.S. Essex to the HMS Bounty: the South Pacific drew them all, and in their way they left mark on its vast surface. Part sailing yarn, part adventure story, part homage to an unending but beckoning horizon, Sailing the Pacific will appeal to the sailor in each one of us, whatever the way we choose to answer the ocean's call.

"My name is Eli Pruparrow, and I'm sailing down the Chesapeake Bay with my friend, Micha Kovnik. In case you don't know, the Chesapeake Bay is one of the biggest bays in the world, and lies smack between Virginia and Maryland. It's full of small fishing villages, islands, and big rivers like the Potomac, James, and Rappahannock. It's really beautiful, but a sailor in the bay has to be careful, there are lots of hazards here and storms come up quick. I might as well tell you how we got here, since it's pretty hard to believe how we ended up in a small boat in the middle of the Chesapeake. We're escapees from one of the worst foster homes ever. I can say this because I'm kind of an expert on foster homes. I've been in a dozen so far."

This is a useful, literate compendium of boating language and terminology.

A terrorist attack in London sends a teenage girl on a dangerous hunt for revenge in this gripping suspense novel from the author of The Voice on the Radio. Laura and Billy Williams are two ordinary American expat kids living with their parents in England. Then, in an instant, everything changes when Billy is handed a mysterious package in a London Underground station . . . Billy’s tragic death leaves a hole in Laura’s heart, one that soon becomes filled with anger and a burning obsession to find the terrorist responsible for taking her brother’s life. Her search for the truth takes her into dangerous territory, forcing Laura to question everyone she knows and everything she believes. The bestselling author of The Face on the Milk Carton ratchets up the tension in this thriller about a girl who will stop at nothing to separate the truth from the lies. This ebook features an illustrated biography of Caroline B. Cooney including rare images and never-before-seen documents from the author’s personal collection.

Jack Tar's Story examines the autobiographies and memoirs of antebellum American sailors to explore contested meanings of manhood and nationalism in the early republic. It is the first study to use various kinds of institutional sources, including crew lists, ships' logs, impressment records, to document the stories sailors told. It focuses on how mariner authors remembered/interpreted various events and experiences, including the War of 1812, the Haitian Revolution, South America's wars of independence, British impressment, flogging on the high seas, roistering, and religious conversion. This book straddles different fields of scholarship and suggests how their concerns intersect or resonate with each other: the history of print culture, the study of autobiographical writing, and the historiography of seafaring life and of masculinity in antebellum America.