Bookshelf

The Last Viking

he untold story of the great polar explorer who conquered the world's last unknown places, before vanishing in a daring bid to rescue his nemesis. Read more>>

1494

he true story involving a corrupt pope — the patriarch of the family fictionalized in the hit Showtime series The Borgias — in an explosive feud between monarchs and the Church that divided the world in half. Read more>>

Merchant Kings

he Merchant Kings of the Age of Heroic Commerce were a rogue's gallery of larger-than-life merchant-adventurers who, during a couple of hundred years, expanded their far-flung commercial enterprises over a good portion of the world to generate revenue for their shareholders, feather their own nests and satisfy their vanity and curiosity. Read more>>

Merchant Kings will be published by Douglas & McIntyre in the fall of 2009. www.douglas-mcintyre.com

Madness, Betrayal and the Lash:

he incredible true story of George Vancouver – world traveler and Royal Navy officer – Madness, Betrayal and the Lash is a tale of adventure at sea, the struggle of empires and of one man’s battle against illness, the isolation of command and Britain’s polarizing class system. When fourteen-year-old Vancouver enlisted with the celebrated James Cook in 1772 he soon found himself transported to lands of which he had never dreamed. During ten years girdling the globe with Cook he learned leadership and marine skills that would guide him on his own epic voyage. Read more>>

Madness, Betrayal and the Lash will be published by Douglas & McIntyre in the spring of 2008. www.douglas-mcintyre.com

Forgotten Highways:

nticed by wilderness and history, Brink and Bown embarked upon a grand journey to explore the history and territory of the original trade and travel routes across the Rocky Mountains. This was the first step in a quest to retrace the pioneering footfalls of David Thompson's 1807 journey across Howse Pass which opened the first intercontinental trade route to the Pacific Ocean. They also followed the trails of Sir George Simpson, Captain John Palliser and Mary Schaffer. Forgotten Highways is the personal account of the authors' travels, mingled with the tales of the historic pathfinders who preceded them. Read more>>

Forgotten Highways will be published in June 2007 by Brindle &Glass. www.brindleandglass.com

A Most Damnable Invention

he dramatic story of two brilliant but controversial men and their world-changing scientific discoveries. Humanity’s desire to harness the destructive capacity of fire is a saga that extends back to the dawn of civilization. But the true age of explosives, when they radically and irrevocably changed the world, began in the 1860s with the remarkable intuition of a sallow Swedish chemist named Alfred Nobel. Read more>>

Scurvy

curvy took a terrible toll in the Age of Sail, killing more sailors than were lost in all sea battles combined. The threat of the disease kept ships close to home and doomed those vessels that ventured too far from port. The willful ignorance of the royal medical elite, who endorsed ludicrous medical theories based on speculative research while ignoring the life-saving properties of citrus fruit, cost tens of thousands of lives and altered the course of many battles at sea. The cure for scurvy ranks among the greatest of human accomplishments, yet its impact on history has, until now, been largely ignored. Read more>>

Sightseers and Scholars

ightseers and Scholars provides portraits of the early naturalists who explored the New World in the pre-Darwinian Age. The book profiles nine important naturalists - both dedicated professionals and amateurs - who set off for what is now North and South America to discover and document the natural wonders they found there. Their stories of adventure are punctuated with hardship, both in finding the financing to get their ventures off the ground, and the vagaries of the elements they encountered in the New World. Despite the odds, these explorers chronicled their adventures in both words and pictures, providing a unique portrait of the natural world in North, South, and Central America before parts of it became widely settled. Read more>>