Join award-winning and bestselling author Eric Jay Dolin at Old Town Hall on Thursday May 2nd at 6:30 as he discusses the true story of a wild and fateful encounter between an American sealing vessel, a shipwreck, and a British warship in the Falkland archipelago during the War of 1812. Fraught with misunderstandings and mistrust, the incident left three British sailors and two Americans, including a captain, abandoned in the barren, windswept, and inhospitable Falkland Islands for a year and a half. With deft narrative skill and unequaled knowledge of the very pith of the seafaring life, Dolin describes in vivid and harrowing detail the increasingly desperate existence of the castaways during their eighteen-month ordeal.
A tale of intriguing complexity, with surprising twists and turns throughout, involving greed, lying, bullying, a hostile takeover, stellar leadership, ingenuity, severe privation, endurance, banishment, the great value of a dog, the birth of a baby, a perilous thousand-mile open-ocean journey in a seventeen-foot boat, an improbable rescue mission, and legal battles over a dubious and disgraceful wartime prize, Left for Dead: Shipwreck, Treachery, and Survival at the Edge of the World shows individuals in wartime under great duress acting both nobly and atrociously, and offers a unique perspective on a pivotal era in American maritime history. Dolin’s upcoming book launches May 7th, but this lecture will provide a sneak peek into Dolin’s book that critics are already calling a “stunning account” and a “riveting, rollicking read.”