One minute I'm walking back home from a nightclub. The next, I'm waking up in a cage. Abducted by aliens. Given to an alien race. Put up for auction. But instead of being sold to the highest bidder, I'm rescued by one of the Brutal Ones: the biggest, baddest bullies in the universe. But it's not a rescue. Not really. My rescuer makes it clear he wants something in return for saving my life... ... an Omega. Me.

In the years before the Civil War, many Americans saw the sea as a world apart, an often violent and insular culture governed by its own definitions of honor and ruled by its own authorities. The truth, however, is that legal cases that originated at sea had a tendency to come ashore and force the national government to address questions about personal honor, dignity, the rights of labor, and the meaning and privileges of citizenship, often for the first time. By examining how and why merchant seamen and their officers came into contact with the law, Matthew Taylor Raffety exposes the complex relationship between brutal crimes committed at sea and the development of a legal consciousness within both the judiciary and among seafarers in this period. The Republic Afloat tracks how seamen conceived of themselves as individuals and how they defined their place within the United States. Of interest to historians of labor, law, maritime culture, and national identity in the early republic, Raffety’s work reveals much about the ways that merchant seamen sought to articulate the ideals of freedom and citizenship before the courts of the land—and how they helped to shape the laws of the young republic.

Robert Shaw is most celebrated today as the Oscar-nominated star in movies like From Russia with Love, A Man For All Seasons, The Sting and - most memorably of all - as Quint in the record-breaking Jaws. His breakthrough came when Hollywood was experiencing something of a British Invasion. Sean Connery, Peter O'Toole, Vanessa Redgrave and Richard Burton were among the new stars. But Shaw was arguably more talented than any, a figure of extraordinary and wide-ranging promise. More than just a mesmerising actor on stage and screen, he was also a gifted writer. He wrote no less than six published novels (winning the Hawthornden Prize), while his plays include the acclaimed Man in The Glass Booth. The flipside to Shaw's diverse abilities was his well-earned reputation as a hellraiser. A fiercely competitive man in all areas of his life, whether playing table tennis or drinking whisky, he emptied mini-bars, crashed Aston Martins, fathered nine children by three different women, made (and spent) a fortune, and set fire to Orson Welles' house. He died at 51, having driven himself too hard, too fast, but unable to get over his father's suicide when Shaw was just 11. John French, Shaw's biographer, knew him well, professionally and personally. Robert Shaw: The Price of Success is a perceptive, sympathetic, but unsparing portrait of the blessings and curses endowing this mercurial, enigmatic and deeply engaging man. This edition features a new foreword written by Richard Dreyfuss. Praise 'Both impressive and immaculate, a tremendously skilled biography... chillingly well told.' Sheridan Morley 'I liked Robert Shaw: The Price of Success tremendously, and applaud its digital rebirth.' Robert Sellers, author of Hellraisers and Don't Let The Bastards Grind You Down