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Other Cruising Books


 
Other cruising books, that Women and Cruising contributors have found useful.

Click on a topic or scroll down the page to see the other cruising books:

 

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This page lists books that Women and Cruising contributors have found useful. Many of these books are listed on our Resources page. Others may have been mentioned by a Women and Cruising contributor in an article. The books are organized according to the topics on the left.

What you WON'T find here on this page are the books that are covered on one of our topical book store pages. Reference books, cookbooks, nature guides, and Women-Writing-About-Cruising books all have their own pages.

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Communications

Today's cruisers have many options for keeping in touch with each other and with folks back home via voice and email.

Capt. Marti Brown

Amazon description

Marine SSB Radio for "Idi-Yachts"® A Guide for Using Marine Single Sideband Radio , by Captain Marti Brown, is a completely revised edition of her guide on how to use a marine SSB radio – for cruisers by a cruiser. Learn how to use your Marine SSB radio the easy way! The second edition has 172 pages with new and expanded sections on: Digital Selective Calling,East & West Coast Weather & Traffic Nets, NAVTEX, Weather Fax, Voice Weather Broadcasts, Emergency Hailing Frequencies, Weather Routing, SSB Radio Installation & Troubleshooting and A handy removable Quick Reference Guide to keep by the radio Also new in this edition is a mail-in offer for a free CD ROM loaded with over 100 informational files, software demos and audio sounds. It is an easy to read reference guide that describes all of the emergency, hailing, and working frequencies, SSB, HAM weather and traffic nets, voice weather, and weather fax frequencies. It explains how to send email and how to make phone calls with your marine SSB radio.

Capt. Marti Brown

Amazon description

The latest in Captain Marti Brown's popular Idi-Yacht series of books is her radio manual for the Icom M802 SSB/HAM DSC radio. It is a guide for the installation and use of the popular Icom radio. Learn how to set up and use your Icom M802 SSB/HAM & DSC radio the easy way! This book translates the Greek of electronics to help you painlessly get up and running on this best-selling recreational SSB radio. Capt. Marti's manual covers the basics on how to install the radio, providing step-by-step instructions so that you can either install the radio yourself or use the textbook to oversee a hired technician's work. The Icom M802 Radio Manual for Idi-Yachts will teach you how to easily navigate the radio such as changing frequencies for voice transmissions, weather broadcasts or radio nets. Sending and receiving all types of Digital Selective Calling transmissions is a breeze as it is described by the author in easy to read English.

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Fitness

When health clubs and gyms are left behind, cruisers have to put together their own fitness regimes.

Kim Hess

Amazon description

Yoga Onboard is a practical guide that offers creative alternatives to adapting traditional yoga postures to a sailing vessel. Using various parts of the boat as props, Kim demonstrates how easy it is to create a yoga practice on whatever size boat you are on. The ideas presented can be applied to any circumstance or location allowing your practice to travel with you. Some of the benefits of a regular yoga practice include increased strength and flexibility, restored energy, and harmony between the body and mind. As your practice deepens you will find that applying the principles of your practice into your life becomes second nature.

Women and Cruising description

Kim Hess is a full-time yoga instructor in Miami Beach and passionate not only about yoga but the sailing lifestyle. Her book, DVD and seminars show you how to adapt yoga to the spaces aboard your boat.

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Kids aboard

Cruising with kids adds some challenges for parents, but most kids seem to thrive. Cruising children are great! They continually impress us with their maturity, social skills, confidence and competencies.

Gwenda Cornell

Amazon description

This book for sailing parents, whether they daysail or cruise for extended periods, with much practical advice from child health and safety to educating and amusing children out of the school.

Jill Schinas

Amazon description

This book, based on 13 years of research and personal experience, is the bible on boating with babies and children. Immensely practical and highly entertaining, it contains a wealth of information on every aspect of the business, including: Introducing children to sailing ideas to keep them from being bored on board, and tips for turning a mutineer into a midshipman; Safety and suitability of different types of yacht; features to look for and those to avoid; Dinghies suitable for use as both tender and sailing craft; Personal safety and an in depth look at the different types of children's lifejackets; ideas to help you cope with seasickness, or even avoid it altogether; absolutely everything you need to know about sailing or cruising with a baby; ocean cruising with kids, including home education.

Women and Cruising comments

Jill Dickin Schinas' book "Kids in the Cockpit" deals with every conceivable aspect of sailing and cruising with children from babyhood through to the teenage years.

Nadine Slavinski

Amazon description

Sailing can be a rich educational experience - but valuable, transferable learning won't just happen by itself. With this learning guide, sailors can lead their children through relevant, fun, hands-on learning experiences that link to national and state curricula. Whether you're setting off on a summer cruise, an ocean crossing, or committing to a year of home schooling, this guide will make learning a family experience that is easy, practical, and enjoyable. This volume includes detailed units that any family can follow on a boat, including lessons in Science, Mathematics, the Humanities, and Physical Education. Each unit contains information on materials required (selected for practicality on a boat), differentiating lessons for children of different ages, tips for enrichment and cross-curricular links, and suggested resources to support learning. The appendix lists links to national and state curricula from the United States, Canada, Australia, and the U.K. so that home schooling students can keep pace with science and mathematics content and expectations in their home systems. Never fear: given a solid boat, a well-prepared crew, and sensible precautions, the ocean can be a safe place to bring your child, and an educational one, too!

Maya Frost

Amazon description

Good-bye, Old School. Hello, Bold School!

In 2005, Maya Frost and her husband sold everything and left their suburban American lifestyle behind in order to have an adventure abroad. The tricky part: they had to shepherd their four teenage daughters through high school and into college. This hilarious and conspiratorial how-to handbook describes the affordable, accessible, and stunningly advantageous options they stumbled upon that any American student can leverage to get an outrageously relevant global education.

Ready to ditch the drama of the traditional hypercompetitive SAT/AP/GPA path? Meet the bold American students who are catapulting into the global economy at twenty with a red-hot college diploma, sizzling 21st-century skills, a blazing sense of direction–and no debt.

You’ll discover:
• the one thing preventing your student from blasting forward
• why Advanced Placement isn’t so advanced
• why international programs fail to provide a truly global education
• the most critical time for your student to study abroad
• the best exchange program in the world ($3,000 or less per year)
• the strategic way to fast-forward through high school
• how to maximize a family sabbatical
• how to live the life of your dreams abroad–and save thousands for college

Packed with myth-busting facts, laughable loopholes, insider insights, astonishing success stories, and poignant tales from the Frost daughters themselves, this inspiring romp is guaranteed to get you cheering.

Women and Cruising comments

Cindy Lesher, who cruised Duchess in the Caribbean with ther family (they are now land-traveling) recommends Maya Frost's blog and book on education.

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Pets aboard

Some cruisers bring along a dog, a cat (or two) or even a bird as crew. Although they can add an extra wrinkle to clearing in and out of some countries, and complicate trips back home, they can be great company aboard.

Diana Jessie

Amazon description

Covers everything that you need to know for bringing your pet along with you when sailing or boating. How to potty train, what and how to feed your pet, animal care and upkeep, pet etiquette, kennel training, pet fashions, first aid and safety and foreign travel. Plus, opinions, stories and answers from dog and cat owners who can't leave their pets at home

David W. LaVigne

Amazon description

This book is written primarily for people cruising aboard boats or RV boondocking with pets, throughout the world in areas with limited veterinary facilities. It covers ways that you, as a pet owner with common sense and a few skills, may be able to treat temporarily until professional care is available. Updated and complete information is provided on how to prepare your pet for the greatest chance of obtaining an import permit into the greatest number of countries. The book now includes a rating system to rate various procedures according to degree of difficulty and possible risk to the patient. Includes suggested lists of drugs and supplies, again rated according to user skill level and duration of cruise. A drug formulary is provided which gives proper drug dosages for many medications. This book is also applicable to backwoods travelers, international travelers, and those spending substantial time in areas where veterinary services are unavailable. Suggested retail price is $35 to $36.

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Sea-going classics

 

Patrick O'Brian

Amazon description

A handsomely bound omnibus edition of Patrick O'Brian's seafaring classics, including three chapters of the unfinished twenty-first novel.

The recent release of the film Master and Commander: The Far Side of the World has focused even more attention on the publishing phenomenon of the late Patrick O'Brian's Aubrey/Maturin novels about the Royal Navy in the age of Nelson. These five volumes, beautifully produced and boxed, contain over 7,000 pages of what has often been described as a single, continuous narrative. They are a perfect tribute to such a literary achievement, and a perfect gift for the serious O'Brian enthusiast. 5 volumes, boxed, 1396 pages each volume.

C. S. Forester

Amazon description

June 1808, somewhere west of Nicaragua-a site suitable for spectacular sea battles. The Admiralty has ordered Captain Horatio Hornblower, now in command of the thirty-six-gun HMS Lydia, to form an alliance against the Spanish colonial government with an insane Spanish landowner; to find a water route across the Central American isthmus; and "to take, sink, burn or destroy" the fifty-gun Spanish ship of the line Natividad or face court-martial. A daunting enough set of orders-even if the happily married captain were not woefully distracted by the passenger he is obliged to take on in Panama: Lady Barbara Wellesley.

Charles Darwin

Amazon description

When HMS Beagle sailed out of Devonport on 27 December 1831, Charles Darwin was twenty-two and setting off on the voyage of a lifetime. His journal, here reprinted in a shortened form, shows a naturalist making patient observations concerning geology, natural history, people, places and events. Volcanoes in the Galapagos, the Gossamer spider of Patagonia and the Australasian coral reefs – all are to be found in these extraordinary writings. The insights made here were to set in motion the intellectual currents that led to the most controversial book of the Victorian age: The Origin of Species.

Alexander Kent

Amazon description

Three novels in one! Sixteen-year-old Richard Bolitho joins the British Royal Navy as a young midshipman. Follow his adventures as he undergoes a severe initiation into the dangerous world of the great sailing warships! 1. Richard Bolitho: Midshipman 1772: a young Richard Bolitho joins the 74-gun Gorgon. Naive and untested, Bolitho must learn the ways of the navy quickly if he is to survive. 2. Midshipman Bolitho and the Avenger 1773: Bolitho returns home to Cornwall for Christmas, but smuggling, ship wrecking and witchcraft tear apart his once-peaceful community. 3. Band of Brothers 1774: Bolitho stands on the brink of manhood and takes his examination to begin his true career as a King's Officer. But soon he must test his mettle against vicious smugglers!

Charles Nordhoff, James Norman Hall

Amazon description

MUTINY ON THE BOUNTY is the thrilling account of the strange, eventful, and tragic voyage of His Majesty's Ship Bounty in 1788-1789, which culminated in Fletcher Christian's mutiny against Captain Bligh.

Jr., Richard Henry Dana

Amazon description

A Breathtaking adventure of the high seas-and a true story

In 1834, Richard Henry Dana went from Harvard student to common seaman, sailing from California to Cape Horn. This journal survives as one of the most vivid accounts of the relationship between man and sea-and still rings true as a portrayal of man-s endurance.

Homer

Amazon description

The epic tale of Odysseus and his ten-year journey home after the Trojan War forms one of the earliest and greatest works of Western literature. Confronted by natural and supernatural threats - shipwrecks, battles, monsters and the implacable enmity of the sea-god Poseidon - Odysseus must test his bravery and native cunning to the full if he is to reach his homeland safely and overcome the obstacles that, even there, await him.

Eric Newby

Amazon description

In 1938, and eighteen year-old boy signed on for the round trip from Europe to Australia in the last commercial sailing fleet to make that formidable journey. The four-masted barque Moshulu ended up as a dockside restaurant in Philadelphia; the young apprentice went on to become one of the greatest travel writers of this century. The Last Grain Race is Eric Newby's spellbinding account of this time spent on the Moshulu's last voyage in the Australian grain trade.

As always, Eric Newby's sharp eye for detail captures the hardships, danger, squabbles, companionship and sheer joy of shipboard life - bedbugs, ferocious storms, eccentric Finnish crew and all. By pure chance, Eric witnesses the passing of the era of a sail, and his take is all the more significant for being the last of its kind.

Farley Mowat

Amazon description

It seemed like a good idea. Tired of everyday life ashore, Farley Mowat would find a sturdy boat in Newfoundland and roam the salt sea over, free as a bird. What he found was the worst boat in the world, and she nearly drove him mad. The Happy Adventure, despite all that Farley and his Newfoundland helpers could do, leaked like a sieve. Her engine only worked when she felt like it. Typically, on her maiden voyage, with the engine stuck in reverse, she backed out of the harbour under full sail. And she sank, regularly.

How Farley and a varied crew, including the intrepid lady who married him, coaxed the boat from Newfoundland to Lake Ontario is a marvellous story. The encounters with sharks, rum-runners, rum and a host of unforgettable characters on land and sea make this a very funny book for readers of all ages.

Joshua Slocum

Amazon description

Captain Joshua Slocum's solo voyage around the world in the 37-foot sloop the Spray in 1895 undoubtedly stands as one of the greatest sea adventures of all time. His classic narrative of this 46,000 mile circumnavigation of the globe continues to enjoy immense popularity throughout the world.

Bernard Moitessier

Amazon description

The Long Way recounts the incredible story of Bernard Moitessier's participation in the first Golden Globe Race a solo, non-stop circumnavigation rounding the three great Capes of Good Hope, Leeuwin, and the Horn. For seven months, the veteran seafarer battled storms, doldrums, gear failures, and knock-downs, as well as overwhelming fatigue and loneliness. Then, nearing the finish with victory in hand, Moitessier suddenly pulled out of the race and sailed on. His 37,455-mile journey continued for another three months, finally ending in Tahiti. Never once in all that time had he touched land.

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Travel & History

Books that expand your understanding of this world, from places you are actually visiting to places you are far from.

Peter Forbath

Amazon description

The worlds most dramatic river and the discovery and exploration.

Women and Cruising comments

If I could pinpoint one book that changed the course of my subsequent reading it would be (perhaps oddly!) The River Congo, by Peter Forbath.

This book brought uncomfortably alive the history of Belgium's impact on the Congo, a history happening in the same period as so many great European seafaring explorations, and, in fact, a direct outgrowth of it. Until that book I'd had little interest in history except as a backdrop for a good novel. And though I'd thought myself a worldly person, I was forced to realize how little I actually understood of what historical forces had steered all the stuff going on in the world.

— Gwen Hamlin

Daniel Boorstin

Amazon description

An original history of man's greatest adventure: his search to discover the world around him.

Women and Cruising comments

Excellent and panoramic. In a preamble, Boorstein says his hero is “Man the Discoverer” and in the book he examines all the horizons that mankind has had to aim at, not just physical ones, but conceptual ones, each of which “had to be opened for us by countless Columbuses” (including a huge section on Chinese exploration!) It made me keen to be my own Columbus, but also to be a careful and considering one.

— Gwen Hamlin

David McCullough

Amazon description

From the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Truman, here is the national bestselling epic chronicle of the creation of the Panama Canal. In The Path Between the Seas, acclaimed historian David McCullough delivers a first-rate drama of the sweeping human undertaking that led to the creation of this grand enterprise.

The Path Between the Seas tells the story of the men and women who fought against all odds to fulfill the 400-year-old dream of constructing an aquatic passageway between the Atlantic and Pacific oceans. It is a story of astonishing engineering feats, tremendous medical accomplishments, political power plays, heroic successes, and tragic failures. Applying his remarkable gift for writing lucid, lively exposition, McCullough weaves the many strands of the momentous event into a comprehensive and captivating tale.

Winner of the National Book Award for history, the Francis Parkman Prize, the Samuel Eliot Morison Award, and the Cornelius Ryan Award (for the best book of the year on international affairs), The Path Between the Seas is a must-read for anyone interested in American history, the history of technology, international intrigue, and human drama.

William Beebe

Women and Cruising comments

William Beebe's 1926 book The Arcturus Adventure recounts his New York Zoological Society expedition by ship to the Galapagos and Cocos Islands which partnered our own trip there.

— Gwen Hamlin

Amazon description

“Melting pot,” a phrase inevitably associated with the United States, may be even more applicable to Mexico, where ancient civilizations merge with modern cultures in a cross-current of peoples, languages and dialects, art and music, religions, hidden cosmologies, and fabled ruins. Travelers' Tales Mexico explores this deep diversity in essays by important writers who have experienced it firsthand. On his journey south of the border, Carlos Fuentes reveals layer upon layer of history in Mexico City's town square; Alice Adams discovers her love for Frida Kahlo's work; Pete Hamill unearths the ghosts of Hollywood in Puerto Vallarta; and Mary Morris moves to San Miguel to find a writer's life. Travelers' Tales Mexico is a lyrical reminder of why it's both a pleasure and a necessity to visit this magnificent country.

Women and Cruising comments

A collection of travel writing about the country. This introduced me to the genre of travel writing and the whole list of Traveler’s Tales titles, numbers of which I ordered and devoured including collections of travel writing about particular places like Australia and Thailand, about food ( The Adventure of Food was an early favorite), and several women's travel collections. These books began to influence the way I wrote my own Blog.

— Gwen Hamlin

Amazon description

Food — its smells, textures, colors, flavors, and rituals — is tied intrinsically to place. This heartwarming, surprising, and sumptuous collection of stories reveals our obsession with how food nourishes and sustains us, teaches us about other cultures, and creates community and connection with others. From the award-winning editor of Travelers' Tales Food, here is another collection of funny and sometimes frightening true stories of eating that will make your mouth water while helping you better understand other cultures. Notable authors include Jeffrey Steingarten, Frances Mayes, Jonathan Raban, John Krich, and Maxine Kumin.

John Steinbeck

Amazon description

This exciting day-by-day account of Steinbeck's trip to the Gulf of California with biologist Ed Ricketts, drawn from the longer Sea of Cortez , is a wonderful combination of science, philosophy, and high-spirited adventure.

Isabel Allende

Amazon description

NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER

In one of the most important and beloved Latin American works of the twentieth century, Isabel Allende weaves a luminous tapestry of three generations of the Trueba family, revealing both triumphs and tragedies. Here is patriarch Esteban, whose wild desires and political machinations are tempered only by his love for his ethereal wife, Clara, a woman touched by an otherworldly hand. Their daughter, Blanca, whose forbidden love for a man Esteban has deemed unworthy infuriates her father, yet will produce his greatest joy: his granddaughter Alba, a beautiful, ambitious girl who will lead the family and their country into a revolutionary future.

The House of the Spirits is an enthralling saga that spans decades and lives, twining the personal and the political into an epic novel of love, magic, and fate.

Mario Vargas Llosa

Amazon description

Haunted all her life by feelings of terror and emptiness, forty-nine-year-old Urania Cabral returns to her native Dominican Republic - and finds herself reliving the events of l961, when the capital was still called Trujillo City and one old man terrorized a nation of three million. Rafael Trujillo, the depraved ailing dictator whom Dominicans call the Goat, controls his inner circle with a combination of violence and blackmail. In Trujillo's gaudy palace, treachery and cowardice have become a way of life. But Trujillo's grasp is slipping. There is a conspiracy against him, and a Machiavellian revolution already underway that will have bloody consequences of its own. In this 'masterpiece of Latin American and world literature, and one of the finest political novels ever written' ( Bookforum ), Mario Vargas Llosa recounts the end of a regime and the birth of a terrible democracy, giving voice to the historical Trujillo and the victims, both innocent and complicit, drawn into his deadly orbit.

Simon Winchester

Amazon description

The bestselling author of The Professor and the Madman and The Map That Changed the World examines the enduring and world-changing effects of the catastrophic eruption off the coast of Java of the earth's most dangerous volcano -- Krakatoa.

The legendary annihilation in 1883 of the volcano-island of Krakatoa -- the name has since become a byword for a cataclysmic disaster -- was followed by an immense tsunami that killed nearly forty thousand people. Beyond the purely physical horrors of an event that has only very recently been properly understood, the eruption changed the world in more ways than could possibly be imagined. Dust swirled round die planet for years, causing temperatures to plummet and sunsets to turn vivid with lurid and unsettling displays of light. The effects of the immense waves were felt as far away as France. Barometers in Bogotá and Washington, D.C., went haywire. Bodies were washed up in Zanzibar. The sound of the island's destruction was heard in Australia and India and on islands thousands of miles away. Most significant of all -- in view of today's new political climate -- the eruption helped to trigger in Java a wave of murderous anti-Western militancy among fundamentalist Muslims: one of the first outbreaks of Islamic-inspired killings anywhere.

Tony Horwitzt

Amazon description

Two centuries after James Cook's epic voyages of discovery, Tony Horwitz takes readers on a wild ride across hemispheres and centuries to recapture the Captain's adventures and explore his embattled legacy in today's Pacific. Horwitz, a Pulitzer Prize-winner and author of Confederates in the Attic , works as a sailor aboard a replica of Cook's ship, meets island kings and beauty queens, and carouses the South Seas with a hilarious and disgraceful travel companion, an Aussie named Roger. He also creates a brilliant portrait of Cook: an impoverished farmboy who became the greatest navigator in British history and forever changed the lands he touched. Poignant, probing, antic, and exhilarating, Blue Latitudes brings to life a man who helped create the global village we inhabit today.

Gavin Young

Amazon description

In this, the sequel to Slow Boats to China (also reissued in Faber Finds), Gavin Young tells, with equal panache, of his return voyage from the China Seas to England, via the South Seas, Cape Horn and West Africa. 'I am decidedly envious of Gavin Young and his Slow Boats Home, successor to his highly entertaining Slow Boats to China ... a fascinating, memorable book.' Eric Newby, the Guardian 'Like Slow Boats to China this is likely to become a classic of travel.' Francis King, the Spectator

W. Somerset Maugham

Amazon description

This anthology is a thorough introduction to classic literature for those who have not yet experienced these literary masterworks. For those who have known and loved these works in the past, this is an invitation to reunite with old friends in a fresh new format. From Shakespeare s finesse to Oscar Wilde s wit, this unique collection brings together works as diverse and influential as The Pilgrim s Progress and Othello. As an anthology that invites readers to immerse themselves in the masterpieces of the literary giants, it is must-have addition to any library.

Jennifer Vanderbes

Amazon description

In this extraordinary fiction debut--rich with love and betrayal, history and intellectual passion--two remarkable narratives converge on Easter Island, one of the most remote places in the world.

It is 1913. Elsa Pendleton travels from England to Easter Island with her husband, an anthropologist sent by the Royal Geographical Society to study the colossal moai statues, and her younger sister. What begins as familial duty for Elsa becomes a grand adventure; on Easter Island she discovers her true calling. But, out of contact with the outside world, she is unaware that World War I has been declared and that a German naval squadron, fleeing the British across the South Pacific, is heading toward the island she now considers home.

Sixty years later, Dr. Greer Farraday, an American botanist, travels to Easter Island to research the island's ancient pollen, but more important, to put back the pieces of her life after the death of her husband.

James A. Michener

Amazon description

Truly one of the most remarkable books to come out of the war. Mr. Michener is a born story-teller."
THE NEW YORK TIMES
Winner of the 1948 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction
Enter the exotic world of the South Pacific, meet the men and women caught up in the drama of a big war. The young Marine who falls madly in love with a beautiful Tonkinese girl. Nurse Nellie and her French planter, Emile De Becque. The soldiers, sailors, and nurses playing at war and waiting for love in a tropic paradise.

William Mariner

Women and Cruising comments

William Mariner's true account as a boy of surviving a massacre of his ship to be “adopted” by the local cannibals.

— Gwen Hamlin

R.A Derrick

Women and Cruising comments

Eye-opening

— Gwen Hamlin

Paul Theroux

Amazon description

In one of his most exotic and breathtaking journeys, the intrepid traveler Paul Theroux ventures to the South Pacific, exploring fifty-one islands by collapsible kayak. Beginning in New Zealand's rain forests and ultimately coming to shore thousands of miles away in Hawaii, Theroux paddles alone over isolated atolls, through dirty harbors and shark-filled waters, and along treacherous coastlines. This exhilarating tropical epic is full of disarming observations and high adventure.

Jared Diamond

Amazon description

Winner of the Pulitzer Prize, Guns, Germs, and Steel is a brilliant work answering the question of why the peoples of certain continents succeeded in invading other continents and conquering or displacing their peoples. This edition includes a new chapter on Japan and all-new illustrations drawn from the television series. Until around 11,000 BC, all peoples were still Stone Age hunter/gatherers. At that point, a great divide occurred in the rates that human societies evolved. In Eurasia, parts of the Americas, and Africa, farming became the prevailing mode of existence when indigenous wild plants and animals were domesticated by prehistoric planters and herders. As Jared Diamond vividly reveals, the very people who gained a head start in producing food would collide with preliterate cultures, shaping the modern world through conquest, displacement, and genocide.The paths that lead from scattered centers of food to broad bands of settlement had a great deal to do with climate and geography. But how did differences in societies arise? Why weren't native Australians, Americans, or Africans the ones to colonize Europe? Diamond dismantles pernicious racial theories tracing societal differences to biological differences. He assembles convincing evidence linking germs to domestication of animals, germs that Eurasians then spread in epidemic proportions in their voyages of discovery. In its sweep, Guns, Germs and Steel encompasses the rise of agriculture, technology, writing, government, and religion, providing a unifying theory of human history as intriguing as the histories of dinosaurs and glaciers. 32 illustrations

Women and Cruising comments

Presents a persuasive analysis of the differences in development by the many different cultures of the world all based on the logical platform of what their bit of earth historically offered them in fundamental resources like domesticable animals or grains. Guns, Germs and Steel was definitely one of those “ah-hah!” books for me.

— Gwen Hamlin

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Misc. Good Reads

Glynis Ridley

Amazon description

The year was 1765. Eminent botanist Philibert Commerson had just been appointed to a grand new expedition: the first French circumnavigation of the world. As the ships’ official naturalist, Commerson would seek out resources—medicines, spices, timber, food—that could give the French an edge in the ever-accelerating race for empire.

Jeanne Baret, Commerson’s young mistress and collaborator, was desperate not to be left behind. She disguised herself as a teenage boy and signed on as his assistant. The journey made the twenty-six-year-old, known to her shipmates as “Jean” rather than “Jeanne,” the first woman to ever sail around the globe. Yet so little is known about this extraordinary woman, whose accomplishments were considered to be subversive, even impossible for someone of her sex and class.

When the ships made landfall and the secret lovers disembarked to explore, Baret carried heavy wooden field presses and bulky optical instruments over beaches and hills, impressing observers on the ships’ decks with her obvious strength and stamina. Less obvious were the strips of linen wound tight around her upper body and the months she had spent perfecting her masculine disguise in the streets and marketplaces of Paris.

Expedition commander Louis-Antoine de Bougainville recorded in his journal that curious Tahitian natives exposed Baret as a woman, eighteen months into the voyage. But the true story, it turns out, is more complicated.

In The Discovery of Jeanne Baret, Glynis Ridley unravels the conflicting accounts recorded by Baret’s crewmates to piece together the real story: how Baret’s identity was in fact widely suspected within just a couple of weeks of embarking, and the painful consequences of those suspicions; the newly discovered notebook, written in Baret’s own hand, that proves her scientific acumen; and the thousands of specimens she collected, most famously the showy vine bougainvillea.

Ridley also richly explores Baret’s awkward, sometimes dangerous interactions with the men on the ship, including Baret’s lover, the obsessive and sometimes prickly naturalist; a fashion-plate prince who, with his elaborate wigs and velvet garments, was often mistaken for a woman himself; the sour ship’s surgeon, who despised Baret and Commerson; even a Tahitian islander who joined the expedition and asked Baret to show him how to behave like a Frenchman.

But the central character of this true story is Jeanne Baret herself, a working-class woman whose scientific contributions were quietly dismissed and written out of history—until now. Anchored in impeccable original research and bursting with unforgettable characters and exotic settings, The Discovery of Jeanne Baret offers this forgotten heroine a chance to bloom at long last.