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The Meticulously Crafted Adventures of David Grann

How a bookish reporter became one of the most sought-after writers in hollywood..

David Grann is the first to say he isn’t a natural-born explorer. Thanks to a degenerative eye condition, the longtime New Yorker writer sees the world as though looking through a windshield during a rainstorm. He doesn’t hike or camp, and he has a tendency to take the wrong train when he rides the subway. While researching The Lost City of Z , his 2009 book about a Victorian-era adventurer who went missing in the Amazon and never returned, he briefly got lost in the Amazon himself. So it wasn’t all that surprising when, on a sunny morning in April, Grann showed up at the wrong location for our interview. When I found him on the sidewalk near the South Street Seaport Museum, where we were supposed to meet, he was grinning from ear to ear. “It’s just like me to get lost,” he said, laughing.

Grann, 56, may not have the strapping physical attributes of his subjects, but his meticulously researched stories, with their spare, simmering setups that almost always deliver stunning payoffs, have made him one of the preeminent adventure and true-crime writers working today. “We often think that reporters have to be super-capable in every way in order to get the best material, but sometimes if you have something like weak sight, you compensate in such a brilliant way that it’s better than if you have the best vision,” said Daniel Zalewski, Grann’s longtime editor at The New Yorker . In just over a decade, Grann has published The Lost City of Z ; Killers of the Flower Moon , about the targeted assassinations of members of the Osage Nation; The White Darkness , about a polar explorer obsessed with crossing Antarctica alone; and two collections’ worth of magazine stories about murderers, master manipulators, and scientists on the hunt for the elusive giant squid.

His latest book, The Wager: A Tale of Shipwreck, Mutiny, and Murder , traces the journey of the H.M.S. Wager , a British warship that ran aground on a Pacific island in 1742 while on a secret mission. Stranded, the crew members mutinied and spent months fighting for survival, testing not only their physical limits but those of military law and the social order. Multiple groups of survivors miraculously made it back to England only to offer different, sometimes conflicting, accounts of the ordeal. More than the adventure story, the Rashomon -like atmosphere is what gives The Wager the intellectual heft of a David Grann endeavor. “After all they had been through — scurvy, shipwrecks, typhoons, violence — these castaway voyagers are summoned to face court-martial, and they could be hanged. So hoping to save their lives, they released testimony or written accounts, which became quite a sensation, but they also sparked this furious war over the truth,” Grann said.

After spending two years poring over journals, court records, and logbooks, he still felt he could never fully understand the experience of the Wager ’s crew unless he visited the island. That’s how this reluctant explorer found himself sitting in a small boat as it motored across a stretch of Pacific Ocean often referred to as the Gulf of Pain, while waves tossed the 50-foot vessel around like a soda can. “That journey was probably stupid, probably foolish, but in the end was really essential,” Grann said. As he walked around the island, the brutal conditions the sailors described — the windchill, the lack of food, the dense foliage that suffocated their movement — felt real. “I understood why this British officer had called Wager Island the kind of place where the soul of man dies. I’m like, Okay, my soul would have died here .”

Grann grew up in Westport, Connecticut, the middle child of the late Victor Grann, a cancer specialist and recreational sailor who occasionally exhibited some of the madman qualities his son would later explore in his subjects (“If a hurricane was coming he would not sail away from it,” Grann said), and Phyllis Grann , a powerhouse book editor and publisher who shared one piece of wisdom above all: Don’t become a writer.

Like any good child, he ignored his mother’s advice. After graduating from Connecticut College, he wrote a coming-of-age novel that he never published and briefly taught fiction while getting a master’s degree in creative writing at Boston University. Eventually, he gave up on fiction and committed himself to journalism, where he has mastered a streamlined, propulsive type of narrative that readers devour for its hide-and-seek reveals. The success of that form is indisputable — Killers of the Flower Moon has sold over a million copies — but it’s not without detractors. “If you taught the artificial brains of supercomputers at IBM Research to write nonfiction prose, and if they got very good at it, they might compose a book like David Grann’s Killers of the Flower Moon ,” Dwight Garner wrote in his New York Times review. Grann, however, is diligent about removing stylistic flourishes from his writing. “You’re really only as good as the material you’re working with,” he said. “You might be able to improve it some, or you may not make it as good as it could have been, but at some level, if the material isn’t good, you’re kind of sunk.”

“David spends weeks and weeks and months and months sifting through possible stories,” said David Remnick, editor of The New Yorker . “I’d wander by his office and he’d be reading these archives and old letters and all kind of material, holding the paper close to his face like an ancient Talmudic scholar.”

Nowhere are the twists and turns of Grann’s stories more hotly anticipated than in Hollywood. According to one film scout, producers sometimes hear about Grann’s ideas before he has committed to pursuing them. Four of his stories have been adapted into movies, and at least four others are in development as either films or series. The bidding war for Killers of the Flower Moon was heated, with the winners paying a reported $5 million for the rights. Martin Scorsese and Leonardo DiCaprio ultimately signed on to make the film, which is scheduled to premiere at the Cannes Film Festival in May. Scorsese and DiCaprio acquired the rights for The Wager last July, nearly a year before its publication.

Inside the Seaport Museum — where Grann revels in the knowledge that its tall ship, the Wavertree , was once battered rounding Cape Horn, just like the Wager — he tells me he doesn’t think about his projects as movies. His interest in the Wager was stoked by an 18th-century account written in stilted English, hardly cinematic gold. This account was given by John Byron (who would one day be the grandfather of the poet Lord Byron), who was 16 when he left Portsmouth aboard the Wager . As Byron’s story was one of a handful given by survivors, “I tried to gather all the facts to determine what really happened,” Grann writes in an author’s note at the beginning of the book.

Where other writers might take liberties, Grann is obsessive about accuracy. “David’s stuff reads like literature, but every detail, every quote, every seemingly implausible glimpse into a subject’s mind is accounted for,” said David Kortava, who fact-checked both The White Darkness and The Wager . Grann verifies his own work before sending it to a fact-checker, and his devotion to the fact-checking process can seem comical. The first time he asked Kortava if he had checked the spellings of his kids’ names on The Wager ’s dedication page, Kortava thought Grann was joking. The second time he asked, Kortava checked the spellings. “He doesn’t have an OCD diagnosis, as far as I know, but I do, and I definitely consider him one of the tribe,” Kortava said.

Grann didn’t always have the freedom to pursue his idiosyncratic interests. He was once a general-assignment magazine writer delivering stories about Barry Bonds, John McCain, and Newt Gingrich. A 2000 profile of the now-deceased Ohio congressman Jim Traficant that Grann wrote for The New Republic helped him discover the types of stories he wanted to tell and how to go about telling them. In an Ohio courthouse, Grann unearthed a 1980 recording of Traficant, then a candidate for sheriff, talking to two mobsters. “I hear Traficant dropping the F-bomb every other word, and I hear him talking about taking bribes, and then I hear about people coming up swimming in the Mahoning River. And it was a voice that was so different from the voice I heard on C-SPAN,” Grann said. “It was kind of the beginning where I was thinking, Oh! These are the voices of the stories I want to tell . It also showed me the power of archives for the first time. You can find things that are just kind of sitting there if you look, and they can peel back façades and get you closer to the hidden truth.”

I ask Grann if he misses reporting on contemporary figures. He holds up his hand and makes a zero with his fingers while letting out a sigh of relief. “The kind of reporting I really like to do is so immersive, and usually figures like that do not want you to be with them,” he said. Their ghosts, he has learned, have no choice.

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StarTribune

Review: 'the wager,' by david grann.

The War of Jenkin's Ear (1739-1748) has long slipped beyond the horizon of popular imagination and into the study carrels of aspiring historians, but at the time it was a flex for the Spanish and British empires as they expanded influence and filled coffers. In his enthralling, seamlessly crafted "The Wager," David Grann re-creates an all-but-forgotten episode from that conflict: the calamitous voyage and shipwreck of HMS Wager off the coast of Chile, and the survivors' fraught treks home. This is the stuff that sea shanties and sailor yarns are made of.

As the two countries mustered arms, the Crown dispatched Commodore George Anson and a small armada on a side mission: to vanquish a Spanish galleon laden with treasure. A lesser vessel, the Wager was captained by the egomaniacal David Cheap, Anson's protégé, determined to prove his mettle. Among the hundreds of men onboard were John Bulkeley, a robust, charismatic gunner; and teenaged John Byron, an aristocratic midshipman and grandfather of the future poet. (Grann draws heavily from their journals.)

Social hierarchies didn't stop at water's edge, but rather applied to the "wooden world" as the ships tacked across the Atlantic.

Anson's armada floundered while rounding Cape Horn, battered by punishing gales and towering waves. Scurvy and other plagues whittled their ranks. The Wager fell behind, buffeted by an onslaught of poor weather until it sank near a desolate Patagonian island.

Grann evokes the moment in a flurry of kinetic clauses: "The bowsprit cleaved, windows burst, treenails popped, planks shattered, cabins collapsed, decks caved in. Water flooded the lower portions of the ship, snaking from chamber to chamber, filling nooks and crannies."

The crew scrambled to shore. For months they scavenged for food, grappled with madness and theft, quarreled incessantly, buried their dead. The taboo of cannibalism crept closer. Anger mounted, as did whispers of the word "mutiny." Cheap and Bulkeley sparred as Lt. Bligh and Fletcher Christian would 50 years later.

After a sudden murder, Bulkeley and most of the men departed on a longboat, headed back to the Straits of Magellan and then on to Brazil, abandoning Cheap, Byron and a few loyalists. Grann's admiration for the gunner's bravery and smarts shines throughout "The Wager," as he observes of Bulkeley's logbook: "The account was something striking in English letters ... packed with more narrative and personal detail than a traditional logbook, and the story was told in a bracing new voice — that of a hard-nosed seaman. In contrast to the often flowery and convoluted prose of the time, it was written in a crisp style that reflected Bulkeley's personality, and was, in many ways, distinctly modern."

After horrific setbacks and losses, the castaways reached Brazil, where they recuperated, eventually journeying back to England.

Cheap and Byron took a more circuitous route to London, joining Bulkeley and others in a court martial, a clash of tales ginned up by a tabloid press, the hangman's noose a distinct possibility. The outcome was shocking. It's a testament to Grann's formidable skills that the denouement contains the book's weightiest revelations about the motivations of empires, the needless sacrifice of men's lives, and the atrocities of colonialism and racism.

He delicately teases out class censures, gentlemen arrayed against commoners conscripted ("pressed") into service, "another ignoble chapter in the long, grim history of nations sending their troops off on ill-conceived, poorly funded, bungled military adventures."

"The Wager," then, is an accomplishment as vividly realized and ingeniously constructed as Grann's previous work, on par with Jon Krakauer's "Into Thin Air" and Sebastian Junger's "The Perfect Storm." Welcome a classic.

Hamilton Cain reviews for the Star Tribune, New York Times Book Review, Washington Post and Boston Globe. He lives in Brooklyn.

The Wager: A Tale of Shipwreck, Mutiny and Murder

By: David Grann.

Publisher: Doubleday, 352 pages, $30.

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David Grann

A tale of shipwreck, mutiny and murder.

A rousing story of a maritime scandal…Drawing on a trove of firsthand accounts—logbooks, correspondence, diaries, court-martial testimony, and Admiralty and government records—Grann mounts a chilling, vibrant narrative…recounting the tumultuous events in tense detail…A brisk, absorbing history and a no-brainer for fans of the author’s suspenseful historical thrillers. — Kirkus, Starred Review

From the #1 New York Times bestselling author of Killers of the Flower Moon and The Lost City of Z , a mesmerizing story of shipwreck, survival, and savagery, culminating in a court martial that reveals a shocking truth.

On January 28, 1742, a ramshackle vessel of patched-together wood and cloth washed up on the coast of Brazil. Inside were thirty emaciated men, barely alive, and they had an extraordinary tale to tell. They were survivors of His Majesty’s Ship the Wager, a British vessel that had left England in 1740 on a secret mission during an imperial war with Spain. While the Wager had been chasing a Spanish treasure-filled galleon known as “the prize of all the oceans,” it had wrecked on a desolate island off the coast of Patagonia. The men, after being marooned for months and facing starvation, built the flimsy craft and sailed for more than a hundred days, traversing 2500 miles of storm-wracked seas. They were greeted as heroes.

But then…six months later, another, even more decrepit craft landed on the coast of Chile. This boat contained just three castaways, and they told a very different story. The thirty sailors who landed in Brazil were not heroes – they were mutineers. The first group responded with countercharges of their own, of a tyrannical and murderous senior officer and his henchmen. It became clear that while stranded on the island the crew had fallen into anarchy, with warring factions fighting for dominion over the barren wilderness. As accusations of treachery and murder flew, the Admiralty convened a court martial to determine who was telling the truth. The stakes were life-and-death—for whomever the court found guilty could hang.

The Wager is a grand tale of human behavior at the extremes told by one of our greatest nonfiction writers. Grann’s recreation of the hidden world on a British warship rivals the work of Patrick O’Brian, his portrayal of the castaways’ desperate straits stands up to the classics of survival writing such as The Endurance , and his account of the court martial has the savvy of a Scott Turow thriller. As always with Grann’s work, the incredible twists of the narrative hold the reader spellbound. Most powerfully, he unearths the deeper meaning of the events, showing that it was not only the Wager’s captain and crew who were on trial – it was the very idea of empire.

More praise for The Wager

THE WAGER has it all: shipwreck, survival, and a thrilling courtroom climax…. the most gripping true-life sea yarn in years. A tour de force of narrative nonfiction, Grann’s account shows how storytelling, whether to judges or readers, can shape individual and national fortunes – as well as our collective memory. — The Wall Street Journal

[Grann has] been your favorite writer’s favorite writer for decades. But with a thrilling new book and an unprecedented back-to-back collaboration with Martin Scorsese and Leonardo DiCaprio, David Grann is poised to become the moment’s leading storyteller…He specializes in gripping historical chronicles and crime stories, filled with fearless explorers and ruthless killers, with twists and double-crosses so rich in intrigue that they would strain credulity in fiction. But Grann’s stories are all true, and because they actually happened, because every detail is invariably backed up by some unearthed court testimony or a dusty file plucked from a long-neglected archive, he’s become one of our culture’s leading sources of  holy shit  page-turners…Grann has managed to push the conventions of true crime and pop history into something more meaningful:  THE WAGER is a story about a shipwreck, but it’s also about how the men who somehow made it off the island told their competing accounts, which became the sensational true-crime of their day, and watching Grann make sense of the tangle raises fascinating questions about how stories take on a life of their own. — GQ

A thrilling account…Those who love yarns involving cannon fire, sea-chests, plum duff and mainmasts will find THE WAGER riveting, as will those less intrigued by the age of sail. In the hands of David Grann, the story transcends its naval setting. The author . . . is a master of exciting tales in far-flung places. He has produced a volume so dramatic and engrossing that it may surpass his previous books. — The Economist

Remarkable…finely detailed…a ripping yarn. Grann, the author of thinking-person’s adventures, has a rare gift for applying the rigors of narrative nonfiction to the stuff of myth and legend. Through tireless research and storytelling guile, he places the reader amongst a tempestuous collection of 18th-century British seamen, at war with the elements and, more fatefully, each other. As you read you feel the sting of freezing saltwater against the face, and the desperate pangs of hunger. Grann guides us step by step, storm by storm, man by man, in prose that the writers he references, including Herman Melville and Joseph Conrad, would appreciate. — The Boston Globe

An engrossing survival story… THE WAGER is a knotty tale of moral compromises and betrayal and a metaphysical inquiry into the elusive nature of truth and the power of stories to shape history and our perceptions of reality. For Grann, telling the story of the shipwreck and its scandalous aftermath was a chance to excavate not just a rousing adventure, but to explore how history is constructed, who writes it and what gets distorted or left out. After six years of research—including his own harrowing journey to the inhospitable island where the castaways washed up—Grann has delivered what will likely endure as the definitive popular account. — The New York Times

A masterclass in storytelling…A series of twists and turns worthy of a well-plotted thriller≥Grann has produced this riveting book so soon after the radically different but equally impressive “Killers of the Flower Moon” — a No. 1 New York Times bestseller. Simply put, Grann is working to a three-part formula. One: unearth a tremendous story from within a forgotten haystack. Two: spend months and months and months researching it. Three: write the narrative with the artistry of a superb novelist…One, two, three. Grann makes it look easy, even while exploring how desperate people behave in life-and-death situations. Hint: not well. This book is a tour de force. — Toronto Star

David Grann knows a good story when he sees one…In THE WAGER: A TALE OF SHIPWRECK, MUTINY AND MURDER , he has found not just a good but a great story, fraught with duplicity, terror and occasional heroism. …One trick Grann pulls off—again and again—is not showing his hand, and this review honors that accomplishment by not revealing the details of what happens next…Another Grann specialty is on full display— creating a cast of indelible characters from the dustiest of sources: 18th century ship’s logs, surgeons’ textbooks, court-martial proceedings… The story of the Wager is, like many of its antecedents—from Homer’s “Odyssey” to “Mutiny on the Bounty”—a testament to the depths of human depravity and the heights of human endurance, and you can’t ask for better than that from a story. Maybe you get seasick at the thought of a seafaring novel; make an exception in this case. THE WAGER will keep you in its grip to its head-scratching, improbable end. — Los Angeles Times

There were multiple moments while reading David Grann’s new book, THE WAGER , about an 18th-century shipwreck, when it occurred to me that the kind of nonfiction narratives The New Yorker writer has become known for share something essential with a sturdy ship. A vessel freighted with historical controversy, tangled facts and monomaniacal characters needs to be structurally sound, containing and conveying its messy cargo. It should be resilient yet nimble enough to withstand the unpredictable waters of readers’ attentions and expectations. Only an impeccable design will keep everything moving…Grann is so skillful…the consummate narrative architect…It’s the kind of inspiring chronicle that would make for a rousing maritime adventure. But this is a David Grann book, and so he gives us something more. — The New York Times

[Grann’s] meticulously researched stories, with their spare, simmering setups that almost always deliver stunning payoffs, have made him one of the preeminent adventure and true-crime writers…The  Rashomon -like atmosphere is what gives  THE WAGER the intellectual heft of a David Grann endeavor…He has mastered a streamlined, propulsive type of narrative that readers devour for its hide-and-seek reveals. — New York Mag

“Grann tells the riveting tale of the British ship the Wager, which embarked from England on a secret mission against Spain in 1740. Two years later, 30 ragged men from the Wager landed ashore in Brazil. Six months after that, three more Wager sailors washed up in Chile. The two groups accused each other of mutiny, eventually going on trial in England.  THE WAGER  reads like a thriller, tackling a multilayered history—and imperialism—with gusto. — Time Magazine

From its first to its last page, THE WAGER never stops being jaw-dropping. Even a sidebar account – of how a ship in the squadron, the Centurion, made it to the Philippines and somehow sank a Spanish galleon – reads better than any thriller. It’s a book about the limits of human endurance but also about the power of Britain’s class system and naval codes, which held sway – almost – even on a deserted island thousands of miles away. — The Globe and Mail

One of the most masterful historical nonfiction writers working today, investigative reporter David Grann has turned his attention to a 1742 shipwreck off the coast of Brazil. [T]his centuries-old crime story feels as prescient and timely as today’s front page. — Elle

Few writers of fact can spin a narrative as well as David Grann, whether it be the quest for a fabled place ( The Lost City of Z ) or unearthing gross injustices against oil-rich Native Americans in the 1920s ( Killers of the Flower Moon ). His gift for detail, drama, and insight is unmatched. THE WAGER , takes place in the 1700s and melds an adventure tale with a courtroom saga that is nothing less than riveting. — AirMail

Grann vividly narrates a nearly forgotten incident with an eye for each character’s personal stakes while also reminding readers of the imperialist context prompting the misadventure. A new account of the Wager Mutiny, in which a shipwrecked and starving British naval crew abandoned their captain on a desolate Patagonian island, emphasizes the extreme hardships routinely faced by eighteenth-century seafarers as well as the historical resonance of the dramatic 1741 event. — BOOKLIST , starred review

A rousing story of a maritime scandal…a brisk, absorbing history.In 1741, the British vessel the Wager, pressed into service during England’s war with Spain, was shipwrecked in a storm off the coast of Patagonia while chasing a silver-laden Spanish galleon. Though initially part of a fleet, by the time of the shipwreck, the Wager stood alone, and many of its 250 crew members already had succumbed to injury, illness, starvation, or drowning. More than half survived the wreckage only to find themselves stranded on a desolate island. Drawing on a trove of firsthand accounts—logbooks, correspondence, diaries, court-martial testimony, and Admiralty and government records—Grann mounts a chilling, vibrant narrative of a grim maritime tragedy and its dramatic aftermath. — KIRKUS , starred review

Bestseller Grann ( Killers of the Flower Moon ) delivers a concise and riveting account of the HMS  Wager . . . Grann packs the narrative with fascinating details about life at sea—from scurvy-induced delirium to the mechanics of loading and firing a cannon—and makes excellent use of primary sources, including a firsthand account by 16-year-old midshipman John Byron, grandfather of the poet Lord Byron. Armchair adventurers will be enthralled. — Publishers Weekly

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Review: A harrowing shipwreck and mutiny in ‘The Wager’

This cover image released by Doubleday shows “The Wager: A Tale of Shipwreck, Mutiny and Murder” by David Grann. (Doubleday via AP)

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“The Wager: A Take of Shipwreck, Mutiny and Murder,” by David Grann (Doubleday)

The Wager, a British war ship, crashed onto rocks amid stormy seas off the coast of Patagonia in 1741. Sailors on a secret wartime mission had already dealt with typhus, lice, blinding squalls, frostbite, worm-eaten biscuits, scurvy and the death of comrades since they set sail months earlier.

It would get much worse.

Stranded on a cold, deserted island, shipwreck survivors scraped seaweed off rocks to boil and eat. Some ate the dead. Crew members blamed their imperious captain for their fate and rigid naval order broke down. Mutineers abandoned their captain on the island after he fatally shot an unruly crew member in the head.

The story of the shipwreck and its aftermath features scenery-chewing characters, unexpected twists and an almost unimaginable amount of human misery. Grann, the author of the acclaimed “Killers of the Flower Moon,” tells it with style. He manages to wring maximum drama out of the events and sketch out nuanced portraits of key players on the doomed ship. Journal entries made on the voyage gave Grann a window into their thoughts and fears.

In a large part, this is the tale of two strong-willed characters on a collision course.

At the helm is David Cheap, who became the ship’s captain after a death at sea. Cheap, new to command, was an authoritarian with a relentless drive to prove his worthiness to superiors. His vainglorious manner and “stubborn defiance of all difficulties” grated on the crew, most notably gunner John Bulkeley.

Bulkeley, a sailor to his bones, was highly competent and increasingly doubtful of Cheap’s judgment as their mission to the Pacific progressed. After the shipwreck, he wrote in his journal that if the captain had only conferred with his officers they “might probably have escaped our present unhappy condition.”

Bulkeley led the group of mutineers off the island, leaving Cheap behind with a small group of loyalists. Bulkeley’s party of barely-alive men landed on the coast of Brazil in January 1742. The story might have ended there, except Cheap and a two other bedraggled souls washed up on the coast of Chile six months later.

Cheap denounced Bulkeley’s party as mutineers. Bulkeley called Cheap a murderer. A court martial was convened to sort out the competing stories.

After defying death in stormy seas and on a cold island, Bulkeley and his mates faced the possible threat of the hangman’s noose.

As Scorsese preps his ‘Flower Moon,’ David Grann’s new book takes to the high seas

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The Wager: A Tale of Shipwreck, Mutiny and Murder

By David Grann Doubleday: 352 pages, $30 If you buy books linked on our site, The Times may earn a commission from Bookshop.org , whose fees support independent bookstores.

What is it about sea stories? Great writers in the tradition of Herman Melville, Joseph Conrad and Patrick O’Brian have used the self-contained world of a ship and its crew to tell stories of fear, greed and rebellion. A shipboard drama, whether it’s a mutiny, a close-quarters battle or a desperate fight to survive the furious elements, shares in common with the locked-room mystery a cast of characters with warring motives and nowhere to go.

New Yorker writer David Grann knows a good story when he sees one; his most recent book, “Killers of the Flower Moon,” about a series of murders on the Osage Indian reservation in the early 1920s, went into multiple printings, and the movie version directed by Martin Scorsese is awaiting theatrical release. In “ The Wager : A Tale of Shipwreck, Mutiny and Murder,” he has found not just a good but a great story, fraught with duplicity, terror and occasional heroism.

With ‘Lost City of Z’ and ‘Killers of the Flower Moon,’ David Grann is a hot literary property

David Grann is what you might call a writer’s writer.

April 18, 2017

The story of “The Wager” begins in 1740. Britain was at war with Spain in a brutal struggle to claim uncharted territory. It was colonialism at its most naked and avaricious, and the battles were largely fought at sea. The Wager was one of eight ships in a squadron that launched from Portsmouth, England, and headed to South America, its goal to capture a Spanish galleon loaded with treasure — a prize that would enrich both the crew and the English government.

The Wager was a small ship, tasked with carrying trade goods, small weapons, gunpowder and the squadron’s supply of rum (the analogy of the “powder keg” unavoidably comes to mind). The crew was a combustible mix of regular sailors, marines and impressed crewmen — impressment being a kind of slavery wherein men were kidnapped and forced to serve for an indefinite period.

Five hundred invalids from the Royal Hospital in Chelsea, many in their 60s and 70s, were ordered to fill out the ranks. As old as 80 and as young as 6, the Wager crew “had been thrown together as if they were subjects in a whimsical experiment to test the limits of human sociability,” Grann writes.

That is putting it mildly. The venture seemed doomed from the start. The squadron immediately ran into trouble when typhus and then scurvy , a grotesque disease of vitamin C deficiency, struck down the majority of the crew. After another ship’s commander died, the Wager’s capable captain was transferred to replace him, and David Cheap, an untested officer who had never been in charge of a ship, was named captain of the Wager’s crew.

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As the squadron approached the tip of South America, the weather worsened; the other ships in the squadron began to turn back. But Cheap, who had just grasped the prize of command over the ship, wouldn’t consider it, and ordered the Wager’s crew to sail into some of the wildest seas and worst weather on Earth.

Many writers have tried to convey just how terrifying the waters around South America’s Cape Horn were in the days of wooden ships and uncertain navigation, as boats battled wild winds, freezing mists and 90-foot waves against a surreal backdrop. One writer was succinct about this Mordor-like terrain: “a proper nursery for desperation.” All this before the Wager passed into Cape Horn, where gales reached 200 miles per hour and subzero temperatures coated the ship with a carapace of ice.

One trick Grann pulls off — again and again — is not showing his hand, and this review honors that accomplishment by not revealing the details of what happens next. Suffice it to say that the Wager and what was left of its crew ran onto the rocks of an exceedingly bleak island off the south coast of Chile.

Given the documentation Grann works with, the reader can intuit that not everyone is going to die (though many do). But as Cheap loses control of his desperate men, starvation, mutiny and murder ensue. British bad behavior scares off a tribe of Indigenous rescuers. And the escape attempts of those who try to make it off the island are so brutal, hair-raising and implausible, the reader is left wondering just what makes some human beings so determined to survive.

Another Grann specialty is on full display — creating a cast of indelible characters from the dustiest of sources: 18th century ship’s logs, surgeons’ textbooks, court-martial proceedings. What a fascinating, conflicted lot they are. Cheap, whose driving desire to prove himself completely extinguishes his common sense. John Bulkeley, the Wager’s gunner, a weapons expert and “instinctive leader” whose Bible-inspired narrative gifts would impel him to write an indelible account of events. “Bulkeley relished recording what he saw,” Grann writes. “It gave him a voice, even if no one but him would ever hear it.”

Then there was Midshipman Jack Byron, 16 when the Wager set sail, whose own account would inspire verse by his renegade grandson Lord Byron on the subject. In his poem “Don Juan,” Byron would memorialize the low moment when starving crewmen killed and ate his grandfather’s dog: What could they do? And hunger’s rage grew wild:/So Juan’s spaniel, spite of his entreating, Was kill’d, and portion’d out for present eating.”

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Besides poems, the story of the Wager would eventually inspire books, a flood of press coverage, a court-martial and a continual retelling of the story, from survivors to naval historians to Patrick O’Brian’s early novel “ The Unknown Shore .” So why read this book, as opposed to the Wikipedia entry?

Besides Grann’s narrative gifts, there’s the age-old reason — to find out how human beings behave under extremes (without suffering them yourself). And Grann puts his story in context, showing what a raw, naked grab for power the age of colonial expansion was. The Wager’s crew was caught in the cogs of a brutal machine, and many had precious little of what we would call free will.

The other strength of the Wager’s story is that it just gets more and more improbable. How did anyone survive? How did English authorities deal with a massive case of bad publicity? How did the traumatized survivors move on? The story of the Wager is, like many of its antecedents — from Homer’s “ Odyssey ” to “ Mutiny on the Bounty ” — a testament to the depths of human depravity and the heights of human endurance, and you can’t ask for better than that from a story. Maybe you get seasick at the thought of a seafaring novel; make an exception in this case. The Wager will keep you in its grip to its head-scratching, improbable end.

Gwinn, a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist who lives in Seattle, writes about books and authors.

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A TALE OF SHIPWRECK, MUTINY AND MURDER

by David Grann ‧ RELEASE DATE: April 18, 2023

A brisk, absorbing history and a no-brainer for fans of the author’s suspenseful historical thrillers.

The author of Killers of the Flower Moon and The Lost City of Z returns with a rousing story of a maritime scandal.

In 1741, the British vessel the Wager , pressed into service during England’s war with Spain, was shipwrecked in a storm off the coast of Patagonia while chasing a silver-laden Spanish galleon. Though initially part of a fleet, by the time of the shipwreck, the Wager stood alone, and many of its 250 crew members already had succumbed to injury, illness, starvation, or drowning. More than half survived the wreckage only to find themselves stranded on a desolate island. Drawing on a trove of firsthand accounts—logbooks, correspondence, diaries, court-martial testimony, and Admiralty and government records—Grann mounts a chilling, vibrant narrative of a grim maritime tragedy and its dramatic aftermath. Central to his populous cast of seamen are David Cheap, who, through a twist of fate, became captain of the Wager ; Commodore George Anson, who had made Cheap his protégé; formidable gunner John Bulkeley; and midshipman John Byron, grandfather of the poet. Life onboard an 18th-century ship was perilous, as Grann amply shows. Threats included wild weather, enemy fire, scurvy and typhus, insurrection, and even mutiny. On the island, Cheap struggled to maintain authority as factions developed and violence erupted, until a group of survivors left—without Cheap—in rude makeshift boats. Of that group, 29 castaways later washed up on the coast of Brazil, where they spent more than two years in Spanish captivity; and three castaways, including Cheap, landed on the shores of Chile, where they, too, were held for years by the Spanish. Each group of survivors eventually returned to England, where they offered vastly different versions of what had occurred; most disturbingly, each accused the other of mutiny, a crime punishable by hanging. Recounting the tumultuous events in tense detail, Grann sets the Wager episode in the context of European imperialism as much as the wrath of the sea.

Pub Date: April 18, 2023

ISBN: 9780385534260

Page Count: 352

Publisher: Doubleday

Review Posted Online: Feb. 10, 2023

Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2023

BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | HISTORY | TRUE CRIME | HISTORICAL & MILITARY | SURVIVORS & ADVENTURERS | EXPEDITIONS | WORLD

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KILLERS OF THE FLOWER MOON

The osage murders and the birth of the fbi.

by David Grann ‧ RELEASE DATE: April 18, 2017

Dogged original research and superb narrative skills come together in this gripping account of pitiless evil.

Greed, depravity, and serial murder in 1920s Oklahoma.

During that time, enrolled members of the Osage Indian nation were among the wealthiest people per capita in the world. The rich oil fields beneath their reservation brought millions of dollars into the tribe annually, distributed to tribal members holding "headrights" that could not be bought or sold but only inherited. This vast wealth attracted the attention of unscrupulous whites who found ways to divert it to themselves by marrying Osage women or by having Osage declared legally incompetent so the whites could fleece them through the administration of their estates. For some, however, these deceptive tactics were not enough, and a plague of violent death—by shooting, poison, orchestrated automobile accident, and bombing—began to decimate the Osage in what they came to call the "Reign of Terror." Corrupt and incompetent law enforcement and judicial systems ensured that the perpetrators were never found or punished until the young J. Edgar Hoover saw cracking these cases as a means of burnishing the reputation of the newly professionalized FBI. Bestselling New Yorker staff writer Grann ( The Devil and Sherlock Holmes: Tales of Murder, Madness, and Obsession , 2010, etc.) follows Special Agent Tom White and his assistants as they track the killers of one extended Osage family through a closed local culture of greed, bigotry, and lies in pursuit of protection for the survivors and justice for the dead. But he doesn't stop there; relying almost entirely on primary and unpublished sources, the author goes on to expose a web of conspiracy and corruption that extended far wider than even the FBI ever suspected. This page-turner surges forward with the pacing of a true-crime thriller, elevated by Grann's crisp and evocative prose and enhanced by dozens of period photographs.

Pub Date: April 18, 2017

ISBN: 978-0-385-53424-6

Review Posted Online: Feb. 1, 2017

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2017

GENERAL HISTORY | TRUE CRIME | UNITED STATES | FIRST/NATIVE NATIONS | HISTORY

BOOK TO SCREEN

UNDER THE BRIDGE

by Rebecca Godfrey ‧ RELEASE DATE: Oct. 1, 2005

A tour-de-force of true crime reportage.

Godfrey reconstructs a horrific murder with a vividness found in the finest fiction, without ever sacrificing journalistic integrity.

The novel The Torn Skirt (2002) showed how well the author could capture the roiling inner life of a teenager. She brings that sensibility to bear in this account of the 1997 murder of a 14-year-old girl in British Columbia, a crime for which seven teenage girls and one boy were charged. While there’s no more over-tilled literary soil than that of the shocking murder in a small town, Godfrey manages to portray working-class View Royal in a fresh manner. The victim, Reena Virk, was a problematic kid. Rebelling against her Indian parents’ strict religiosity, she desperately mimicked the wannabe gangsta mannerisms of her female schoolmates, who repaid her idolization by ignoring her. The circumstances leading up to the murder seem completely trivial: a stolen address book, a crush on the wrong guy. But popular girls like Josephine and Kelly had created a vast, imaginary world (mostly stolen from mafia movies and hip-hop) in which they were wildly desired and feared. In this overheated milieu, reality was only a distant memory, and everything was allowed. The murder and cover-up are chilling. Godfrey parcels out details piecemeal in the words of the teens who took part or simply watched. None of them seemed to quite comprehend what was going on, why it happened or even—in a few cases—what the big deal was. The tone veers close to melodrama, but in this context it works, since the author is telling the story from the inside out, trying to approximate the relentlessly self-dramatizing world these kids inhabited. Given most readers’ preference for easily explained and neatly concluded crime narratives, Godfrey’s resolute refusal to impose false order on the chaos of a murder spawned by rumors and lies is commendable.

Pub Date: Oct. 1, 2005

ISBN: 0-7432-1091-3

Page Count: 368

Publisher: Simon & Schuster

Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2005

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by Rebecca Godfrey

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October Book Review | 'The Wager: A Tale of Shipwreck, Mutiny and Murder'

High seas adventure and intrigue abound in the true story of the castaways of a British war vessel in 1741. This month’s book review covers “The Wager: A Tale of Shipwreck, Mutiny and Murder” by David Grann.

The colonial Navies of England and Spain were plundering and fighting halfway across the world in the mid-18 th century. England launched a squadron of five ships including one named The Wager in 1741. Their mission was to attack a Spanish galleon off the coast of Patagonia and capture the silver, gold, and porcelain that Spain had pirated.

Over 250 men set off on The Wager’s ambitious voyage. All was not fun and swagger, however. The Admiralty’s officers had the most to gain from the bounty. The rest of the crew ranged from those forced into service to outlaws and others with dim prospects at home in England. The ships had dwindling provisions, and the crew endured rough seas, sickness, famine and despair. Most perilous was navigating the dreaded Drakes Passage around Cape Horn at the southern tip of the South American continent.

The Wager became separated from the other ships and shipwrecked along the western coast of Patagonia. What ensued was a wrenching experience of survival and mutiny against the ship’s captain. A gunner and a carpenter, low in the Navy’s hierarchy, led a rebellion of survivors who set off in a small makeshift vessel to return to England. So began their harrowing voyage east through the Strait of Magellan. Thirty made it as far as Brazil.

“The Wager” is a compilation of perspectives from various personal accounts of the voyage. Author David Grann, author of the celebrated, “Killers of the Flower Moon” researched the history of the journey in detail from ship logbooks, journals, correspondence, and newspapers. The product is one gripping story of endurance, suspense, deceit, and the testing of loyalty under extreme conditions. Ultimately, the surviving mutineers had one of their greatest challenges: surviving the English Navy’s system of court-martial.

This book draws you into 1741 high seas drama in the first few pages and never lets you go. David Grann has earned another winner on the bestseller list.

“The Wager” is available from the Park City and Summit County libraries.

David Grann’s ‘The Wager’ looks beneath the veneer of civilization in a tale of mutiny and empire

David Grann begins his propulsive, finely detailed seafaring saga “The Wager” with a caveat of sorts: “I must confess that I did not witness the ship strike the rocks or the crew tie up the captain. Nor did I see firsthand the acts of deceit and murder.” But you would scarcely know it from reading these pages. Grann, the author of thinking-person’s adventures including “The Lost City of Z” and “Killers of the Flower Moon” (soon to be a Martin Scorsese movie), has a rare gift for applying the rigors of narrative nonfiction to the stuff of myth and legend. Through tireless research and storytelling guile, he places the reader amongst a tempestuous collection of 18th-century British seamen, at war with the elements and, more fatefully, each other. As you read you feel the sting of freezing saltwater against the face, and the desperate pangs of hunger. This is a ripping yarn disguised as an acute study of group psychology, or perhaps the other way around. However you categorize “The Wager,” it is a remarkable book. Scorsese must agree: he and Leonardo DiCaprio are already slated to bring it to the screen.

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In 1740 a squadron of six British warships and two transports, flush with dreams of riches and the blinkered pride of empire, took to the seas. Their mission was to capture a treasure-filled Spanish galleon and return home wealthy heroes. Things did not go well, especially not for HMS Wager, a man-of-war battered by weather and rocks and ultimately shipwrecked on a remote island off the south coast of Chile. There the men split into warring factions, grew deathly ill, and, in some instances, ate each other. No longer bound by fealty to their mission and the laws of the country they served, they descended into chaos and madness. Their veneer of unity and civilization, already chipped away by sundry resentments, collapsed entirely.

Grann guides us through this process, step by step, storm by storm, man by man, in prose that the writers he references, including Herman Melville and Joseph Conrad, would appreciate. The book invites landlubbers in with vivid descriptions of life at sea, peppered with explanations of phrases and idioms given us by that life. (One of my favorites: “When ailing seamen were shielded from the adverse elements outside, they were said to be ‘under the weather.’”) Grann plays off the famous opening line of Stephen Crane’s short story “The Open Boat” — “None of them knew the color of the sky” — with his own blunt salvo: “The only impartial witness was the sun.” The wild thing is that he earns the right. “The Wager” reads like enhanced literary naturalism; at times you have to blink and remember that you’re reading a true story.

The book patiently introduces the characters who will emerge as key combatants as the drama develops. There’s the ambitious Captain Cheap, loathed by many of his men, revered by others; he gains the helm of the Wager through a mid-voyage shakeup of personnel and struts his authority like a man who has waited too long for this opportunity. His prime adversary is John Bulkley, the pious gunner who proves to be a natural leader, or, as Cheap would have it, an opportunistic mutineer. The teen midshipman John Byron is an adventurous romantic at heart, much like his grandson, the poet Lord Byron, would be; his loyalties are divided, between the captain, whom he has sworn to serve, and the gunner, whose grave doubts about Cheap appear to be well founded.

Thrown together to complete a dangerous task, the men coexist. There are rules to follow, regimented responsibilities to meet, country to serve. When such organizing principles are removed, however, things fall apart; the center cannot hold. Grann never has to come out and say it explicitly, but “The Wager” is ultimately a reminder that we are all animals, kept under control and bound by fragile if well-established societal strictures, and, under ideal circumstances, human decency. Take away those ideal circumstances and it gets dark early.

“The Wager” is also a tale of imperialism’s folly. Early in the shipwreck the men encounter an indigenous tribe eager to help. Then the meaner, drunker, more entitled members of the shipwrecked party scare the tribe away; they are never heard from again. Grann is quite aware of the “White Man’s Burden” element of this story, the destructive arrogance of empire made even clearer as the few survivors straggle home to England and begin publishing their accounts. Then again, when cannibalism becomes an option, seeing the big picture can get difficult.

Here Grann deserves quoting at length. “The authors rarely depicted themselves or their companions as the agents of an imperialist system,” he writes. “They were consumed with their own daily struggles and ambitions — with working the ship, with gaining promotions and securing money for their families, and, ultimately, with survival. But it is precisely such unthinking complicity that allows empires to endure. Indeed, these imperial structures require it: thousands and thousands of ordinary people, innocent or not, serving — and even sacrificing themselves — for a system many of them rarely question.”

In this sense, the Wager fiasco was merely an extension of the system that spewed these unfortunate men into the sea.

THE WAGER: A Tale of Shipwreck, Mutiny and Murder

By David Grann

Doubleday, 352 pages, $30

Chris Vognar, a freelance culture writer, was the 2009 Nieman Arts and Culture Fellow at Harvard University.

The Wager: A Tale of Shipwreck, Mutiny and Murder Book by David Grann

10 Mar The Wager: A Tale of Shipwreck, Mutiny and Murder Book by David Grann

Introduction.

In his gripping new nonfiction book The Wager: A Tale of Shipwreck, Mutiny and Murder , bestselling author David Grann ( Killers of the Flower Moon , The Lost City of Z ) unearths the harrowing true story of the British naval ship the Wager, which wrecked off the coast of Patagonia in 1741. Grann masterfully weaves together a tale of survival, power struggles, and conflicting narratives that sheds light on the costs of imperialism and the elusive nature of truth.

Drawing on a wealth of archival sources, including journals, court records, and other firsthand accounts, Grann reconstructs the doomed voyage of the Wager and the crew’s desperate attempts to return home after the shipwreck. The book has been hailed as one of Grann’s finest, displaying his signature flair for propulsive storytelling, meticulous research, and incisive analysis. The Wager was an instant New York Times bestseller.

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Plot Summary

“The Wager: A Tale of Shipwreck, Mutiny, and Murder” by David Grann is a gripping nonfiction account that delves into a dramatic and largely forgotten episode in maritime history. The book is set in the 18th century during the War of Jenkins’ Ear, a conflict between Britain and Spain. The narrative focuses on the British naval ship HMS Wager and its ill-fated voyage.

The Wager, part of a squadron led by George Anson, was tasked with intercepting Spanish treasure galleons in South America. The ships set sail for Cape Horn, at the southern tip of South America, navigating the treacherous Drake’s Passage known for its severe storms and dangerous currents. As fate would have it, the Wager was wrecked near the coast of what is now Chile, stranding its survivors on an uninhabited island without adequate food or freshwater resources.

The situation on the island rapidly deteriorated. Captain David Cheap struggled to maintain order, but low on supplies and wracked by injury and disease, the men soon descended into mutiny and factionalism. Two groups eventually set off in makeshift boats in an attempt to reach civilization – one led by the ship’s captain David Cheap, the other by a charismatic gunner named John Bulkeley. Remarkably, some from each party survived the perilous open-sea journey. But upon returning to England, they told vastly different stories about what transpired, each accusing the other of treachery and murder.

Grann’s narrative not only recounts the harrowing survival tale but also explores the complex dynamics of leadership, loyalty, and survival under extreme conditions. The story also includes a court martial back in Britain, where the returning survivors faced accusations of mutiny and murder.

“The Wager” provides a vivid picture of life at sea during the 18th century, the perils of naval exploration, and the human capacity for both heroism and treachery in the face of adversity. David Grann, through meticulous research and compelling storytelling, resurrects this historical incident, showcasing his ability to weave a suspenseful narrative that is both informative and engaging.

Grann focuses his narrative on three key figures: Captain David Cheap, an ambitious but rigid disciplinarian; John Bulkeley, the competent and courageous gunner; and young midshipman John Byron, who kept a vivid account of the disaster.

Through these men’s eyes, Grann skillfully captures the physical and psychological toll of the ordeal, as well as the clash of personalities and shifting power dynamics among the survivors. While Cheap clings to the navy’s hierarchy and his own command, Bulkeley emerges as a natural leader to whom many men turn. The portrayals are nuanced and empathetic, revealing each character’s flaws, merits, and motivations.

Themes and Motifs

At its core, The Wager grapples with questions about the limits of human endurance, the tensions between order and anarchy, and the subjectivity of historical truth. Grann explores how the survivors’ accounts were shaped by their biases, self-interest, and notions of honor and duty.

The shipwreck also serves as a grim metaphor for the costs of British imperialism and colonialism. Grann situates the Wager’s mission within the broader context of Europe’s exploitation of South America and the destruction wrought on indigenous peoples. Notions of civilization and savagery are upended as the British sailors turn on each other in a Hobbesian struggle.

Writing Style and Tone

Grann is a master of narrative nonfiction, and his vivid, economical prose brings the story to life with gripping immediacy. Take this description of the ship battling a storm:

The sails convulsed and the ropes whipped and the hulls creaked as if they might splinter. The ships’ prows, including the Centurion’s red-painted lion, plunged into the deep hollows, before rearing upward pleadingly toward the heavens.

Grann also has a keen eye for the telling detail, from the rations of rancid cheese to the blood-soaked scraps of clothing. The tone is authoritative and evenhanded, but laced with a current of moral outrage at the cruelty and injustice on display.

Evaluation and Conclusion

The Wager is a spellbinding and thought-provoking read that cements Grann’s reputation as one of our finest nonfiction writers. By excavating this forgotten episode of maritime history, Grann sheds light on enduring truths about human nature and the myths nations tell about themselves.

While it lacks the contemporary resonance of some of his previous books, The Wager is still an engrossing, deeply researched work that will appeal to fans of narrative history, survival stories, and true crime. It’s an incredible tale of shipwreck and savagery that lingers long after the final page.

Favorite Quotes

“Each man in the squadron carried, along with a sea chest, his own burdensome story.”

This opening line beautifully encapsulates the book’s central theme of competing narratives and subjective truth.

“Although the dispute centered on a simple matter of which way to go, it raised profound questions about the nature of leadership, loyalty, betrayal, courage, and patriotism.”

Grann frames the survivors’ power struggle as a microcosm of larger moral and political quandaries.

“The powerful narrative reveals the deeper meaning of the events on The Wager, showing that it was not only the captain and crew who ended up on trial, but the very idea of empire.”

The book exposes the dark underbelly of British imperialism and the human toll of colonization.

With The Wager , David Grann has crafted a gripping and resonant work of narrative nonfiction that ranks among his finest books. This harrowing tale of shipwreck and survival offers a bracing glimpse into the best and worst of human nature under extreme duress. Meticulously researched and masterfully told, it’s an unforgettable story that will leave readers pondering questions of truth, power, and moral culpability. Highly recommended for fans of Grann’s previous work and readers of narrative history.

Spoilers/How Does It End

After returning to England, the two groups of Wager survivors tell contradictory stories at an Admiralty hearing. Captain Cheap portrays Bulkeley and the others as mutineers, while they accuse Cheap of murder and tyranny. In the end, no one is seriously punished, as the Admiralty is reluctant to publicize the embarrassing affair. The survivors go their separate ways, forever marked by their ordeal.

Young John Byron, who sided with the Captain, goes on to have a notable naval career, keeping the story alive through his written account. But the Wager incident fades into obscurity, a shameful reminder of the human cost of Britain’s imperial ambitions. The book suggests that in the end, the real villain is not any one individual, but the system of power and exploitation they served.

About the Author

David Grann is a #1 New York Times bestselling author and an award-winning staff writer at The New Yorker magazine. His previous books include Killers of the Flower Moon , The Lost City of Z , and The White Darkness . Grann’s stories have appeared in several anthologies and been translated into over 30 languages. Before joining The New Yorker in 2003, he was a senior editor at The New Republic and The Hill.

Grann is known for his exhaustive research, immersive storytelling, and ability to uncover buried truths. Many of his stories center on obsessive quests and moral reckonings. He holds master’s degrees in international relations from the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy and creative writing from Boston University. Grann lives in New York with his wife and two children.

Publication History and Reception

The Wager: A Tale of Shipwreck, Mutiny and Murder was published in hardcover by Doubleday on April 18, 2023. It debuted at #1 on the New York Times Bestseller list and has garnered rave reviews from critics. The book was selected as one of the best books of 2023 so far by outlets including Amazon, Goodreads, and Barnes & Noble.

Film rights to The Wager were acquired by New Regency and Plan B Entertainment in 2022, with a feature adaptation to be directed by Martin Scorsese and star Leonardo DiCaprio. This will mark the second Grann book adapted by the Oscar-winning duo, following Killers of the Flower Moon (2023).

Bibliographic Details

• The book focuses on the 1741 wreck of the British ship the Wager off the coast of Patagonia and the crew’s harrowing attempts to survive and return home.
• It draws on archival sources including journals, court records, and firsthand accounts to reconstruct the events.
• The book debuted at #1 on the New York Times nonfiction bestseller list.
• Film rights were acquired by Martin Scorsese and Leonardo DiCaprio, who plan to adapt it as a feature film for Apple.
• It is Grann’s fifth nonfiction book, following bestsellers like Killers of the Flower Moon and The Lost City of Z.

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A Tale of Shipwreck, Mutiny and Murder

by David Grann

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• Tara T. (Carterville, IL) The Wager I found this book to be well researched, well-written and extremely easy to read. It was actually quite a thrilling read to be honest. It felt more like I was reading an adventure book than a nonfiction book. The beginning was slow for me to get into, but once the boats set sail, the pacing picked up immensely and I was hooked at that point. I thoroughly enjoyed reading this one.
• Mary G. (Greensboro, GA) Fans of Erik Larson will Love The Wager Meticulously researched and deeply detailed, this is the story of an ill-fated British warship, the Wager. Although an entire fleet left England in 1740 on a secret mission against the Spanish, only one ship returned to England. A couple of ragtag groups of shipwrecked survivors, who endured unimaginable privation and hardship, also made it home more than two years after setting sail. David Grann literally takes the reader onto the deck of the Wager. The reader is swept along as the crew weathers storms, scurvy, and finally, shipwreck. He focuses on the stories of a handful of the officers and seamen who played critical roles in the fate of the ship and its crew. Their thoughts, fears, and determination make for riveting reading. The book is broken into four sections: pre-mission preparation, the disastrous voyage, the desperate struggle for survival after the shipwreck, and the improbable return of the few survivors to England. The conflicting accounts of the voyage and shipwreck by these survivors adds to the drama. Amazingly, after enduring great hardship to finally return home, the survivors are rewarded with a trial to judge their actions and, potential hanging. While this is an absorbing and fascinating book, the story takes a long time to get going. There is an overabundance of detail on shipbuilding and the pre-trip preparation, as well as on the other ships in the fleet. However, once the fleet sets sail, the book takes off.
• Anke V. (Portland, OR) The Wager Set in 1740, this is the story of the treacherous journey of six English warships, the Wager among them, with the secret mission of capturing Spanish silver and gold near the tip of South America. While rounding Cape Horn, and battling an outbreak of scurvy, the weather conditions turned atrocious, and the Wager became separated from the rest of the squadron. Shipwrecked on a desolated island, the surviving crew struggles against the elements, splitting into two groups: one that mutinied against their Captain, David Cheap, and a smaller group that remained loyal to him. Five months after the shipwreck, self-elected Captain Bulkeley and his mutinous group of 80 members set off in a schooner, losing and abandoning more than half of its crew on their on their way to Brazil, eventually arriving back in England at the beginning of 1943. Here their troubles continued, as the survivors made it back with conflicting stories, knowing that they were guilty of some crime or another that would earn them the death sentence. To justify his actions, John Bulkeley even published his story based on his personal log as a way of justifying their actions. Five and a half years after setting out from England, Captain Cheap arrived back in England along with two of his loyal men, ready to defend his honor. In an attempt to determine the truth, the English admirals start a trial to investigate these contradicting versions of the truth, and a way to contain the catastrophic results and costs of this expedition. Based on personal and detailed diaries of the captains and seamen, this book has elements of true crime and history. It gives you a true sense of daily life on a ship, the crowded conditions, the dangerous work, deaths due to typhoid fever and scurvy, the starvation when supplies run low, and what struggling to survive in an inhospitable land does to your psyche, all described in chilling detail.
• Lois K. (Marana, AZ) The Wager - A Voyage to Oblivion David Grann's latest book, "The Wager," is an extremely well-documented tale about life and death in the 18th century British navy. "The Wager" is one of a group of British naval vessels sailing to Cape Horn in pursuit of the Spanish enemy, to hopefully, capture a Spanish galleon filled with treasure. It's a riveting, page-turning adventure, complete with shipwreck, mutiny and murder. What makes this book so compelling, is that it is fact-based. Grann carefully documents his sources (and there are many), from the archives of the British Navy to books published by actual participants in the tragedy. The story details the harrowing attempts of these sailors to survive in one the most dangerous areas of the world. The most thought provoking aspect of the book for me, is the insanity of war, all of the suffering and loss of life accomplishing nothing.
• Iris P. (Des Moines, IA) "Red sky at night, sailors' delight. Red sky in the morn, sailors' forlorn" Meticulously researched and expertly described—with illuminating background details. David Grann newest book, The Wager, places the reader into the riggings and high onto the sails in 1740 as the ship sails from Portsmouth and round Cape Horn. The fight for God and Country. Life and liberty. And Honor. Measure their worth, if you dare, as you slog along with the crew for each day's survival. Magnificently resilient and triumphant? Or Survival at all cost. Or—at any cost? Author David Grann makes You the Judge. Well done!
• Suzanne B. (Merrimac, MA) Great author-fabulous adventure I am so happy to review this book, The Wager. Two months ago I just finished David Grann's book The Lost City of Z which I devoured and gave a 5/5 stars. Grann is an engaging and amazing storyteller. I appreciated that this book was so meticulously researched and the author did a great job presenting the sides of each of the characters in the book so we could form our own decisions on what we deemed right/wrong (or simply who to cheer for). I had empathy for all the characters in this story due to the authors fair descriptions of the trials and tribulations each faced! I love a book that I can learn from yet, at the same time, is a page turner-which this hit out of the park! What makes this story so fascinating is the story covers so many facets; it is not just a shipwreck story. The focus of the story changes to a mutiny (or is it even a mutiny if the ships is no longer at Sea), to a survival story, to a morale conflict story (who should be sacrificed and based on what) to a legal story (the court martial), and finally a good history refresher of this fascinating time in history.. My only challenge was in the beginning I feel I had read or watched shows with many of the scenes of illness/sickness/scurvy/survival of the ship and not a lot was new to me. But the last 2/3 of the book was amazing including the painful decisions that had to be made by so many; including the scene where 4 Marines had to be left on the island, to the Captain shooting a mutineer which was justified by him and others to preserve order.. There was so much action in this book. Even when a few of the ships landed safely there was the court martial event-and interesting on what decisions were made based on England's desire for the world to focus on their one huge win, the capture of the Spanish Treasure ship. Danger lurked as one of the men tried publish a book in which many others tried to stop the publishing due to the fear of the events making them look guilty and subject to a court martial. The story leads us to the different versions of books written by the different people from these ships, but ultimately what we choose what we want to believe as the reader. I am so relieved I was never on a ship during those times and would be a horrible Captain-making tough decisions daily-I will continue to be a reader of these books only ;). I cannot wait to read Grann's other book, Killers of the Flower Moon and any future books he writes! Thank you!
• Linda M. (Ocala, FL) A Wild Ride I have read two other books by David Grann so my expectations were high when I began to read The Wager. Coincidentally, I had just returned from a trip through the Strait of Magellan and the Drake Passage to Cape Horn so I have personally experienced the wind, sleet, fog, clouds rocky cliffs and raging seas that he so vividly describes. Reading this book swept me right back to this wild place. Grann is a skilled storyteller who is able to keep the reader engaged as he tells the story of a ship sailing in the 1700s when ships were barely seaworthy, and scurvy, fatal accidents, hunger and thirst were every day events. Unfortunately, shipwrecks were not an uncommon occurrence either. The descriptions of the storms, the land, the natives and the struggles of the crew in the extremely hostile environment keep the reader turning the pages. Grann educates and entertains the reader. My kind of book.

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The Wager: A Tale of Shipwreck, Mutiny and Murder Hardcover – April 18, 2023

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• Print length 352 pages
• Language English
• Publisher Doubleday
• Publication date April 18, 2023
• Dimensions 6.43 x 1.22 x 9.53 inches
• ISBN-10 0385534264
• ISBN-13 978-0385534260
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• Publisher ‏ : ‎ Doubleday; First Edition (April 18, 2023)
• Language ‏ : ‎ English
• Hardcover ‏ : ‎ 352 pages
• ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 0385534264
• ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-0385534260
• Item Weight ‏ : ‎ 1.49 pounds
• Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 6.43 x 1.22 x 9.53 inches
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About the author

David grann.

DAVID GRANN is a #1 New York Times bestselling author and a staff writer at The New Yorker magazine. He is the author of the critically acclaimed books "The Wager," "The Lost City of Z," and "Killers of the Flower Moon," which was a finalist for the National Book Award. He is also the author of "The White Darkness" and the collection "The Devil and Sherlock Holmes: Tales of Murder, Madness, and Obsession." His book "Killers of the Flower Moon" was recently adapted into a film directed by Martin Scorsese and starring Leonardo DiCaprio, Lily Gladstone, and Robert De Niro. Several of his other stories, including "The Lost City of Z" and "Old Man and the Gun," have also been adapted into major motion pictures. His investigative reporting and storytelling have garnered several honors, including a George Polk Award and an Edgar Allan Poe Award.

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A dewy-eyed look at the life and death of Carolyn Bessette-Kennedy

Twenty-five years after her death in a plane crash, a new book, “Once Upon a Time,” delivers a cloying look into the life of JFK Jr.’s wife.

In 1996, Sotheby’s auctioned more than 5,500 items from the estate of Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis, who had died two years earlier. The winning bids shattered all presale estimates: A monogrammed silver tape measure went for $48,875, a faux-pearl necklace for $211,500. The four-day total topped an astonishing $34 million . “Most of the items were not exceptional works of art or craftsmanship, nor were they even from the White House era,” Elizabeth Beller writes in a new book. “They were all Jackie.”

The enduring romance and glamour of Camelot cannot be overstated. The Kennedys were the closest this country gets to a royal family, and Jackie’s beloved son — handsome, playful, adored — was America’s crown prince and most eligible bachelor. When John Jr. married Carolyn Bessette a few months after the auction, the fashion publicist was transformed into an international celebrity overnight.

They were a beautiful couple. She was a tall, elegant blonde with a cool reserve that complemented his effortless charm. Many people believed that one day John Jr. would become president, and she would be first lady. That dream ended tragically when John, Carolyn and her sister died in a plane crash in the summer of 1999.

Now, 25 years later, Beller has written a biography, “ Once Upon a Time: The Captivating Life of Carolyn Bessette-Kennedy .” The writer, who never met Carolyn, very much wants her subject to be remembered as extraordinary in her own right, not as an ordinary young woman pulled into the Kennedy orbit. To underscore her point, the book opens with an author’s note: Beller says she wants to defend the “slanderous” rumors that Carolyn was shallow, difficult and manipulative, characterizations she attributes to a “dysfunctional culture,” the anti-feminist patriarchy and the media. Her decision to write this book “was not so much a choice as a compulsion.”

It’s fair to wonder if compulsion is the best starting point. A great biography is intimate but honest, compassionate but unflinching. Sigmund Freud believed that biographers were susceptible to transference — romanticizing and sanitizing the narrative in response to unconscious fantasies. At the very least, Beller stumbled into the classic rookie mistake: She fell in love with her subject and so could never see her objectively.

The result is an effusive, almost worshipful portrait of a modern-day princess, stripped of agency or nuance. In Beller’s telling, Carolyn is stunning, caring, brilliant, hilarious and passionate but surrounded and hounded by people who are jealous or simply cruel. Beller interviewed dozens of people — although not the Bessette or Kennedy inner circle, despite her efforts — and the memories are overwhelmingly positive. It’s not surprising that friends want to protect Carolyn’s legacy and diminish her flaws, but the book is a paean to a doomed goddess instead of a reflective examination of a woman thrust into a life she was unprepared for and ill-equipped to survive.

Carolyn’s star rose quickly. After graduating from Boston University in 1988 — a semester late because she was busy promoting local nightclubs — she landed a job as a saleswoman for Calvin Klein’s boutique in Boston. Soon she moved to Klein’s headquarters in New York. She was originally assigned to VIP clients and then became a public relations executive and a darling in Manhattan’s fashion and club scene.

In passage after passage, Carolyn is described as a muse, a mentor, dazzling yet unpretentious . Beller praises her subject as a “super empath” — someone exceptionally sensitive to the feelings of others. Never mind the friends who saw her throwing herself at her friends’ boyfriends. “It was a move at odds with her usually nurturing persona,” writes Beller, “but not necessarily with the fragility beneath the gentleness.”

Call it insecurity, call it vanity, call it a cry for help. Or don’t. Carolyn bragged that no man had ever dumped her. Beller argues that “it stands to reason” that Carolyn would have trouble trusting men because her parents had divorced when she was 8, and she was estranged from her father. (An armchair psychologist might call that unfair to her doting stepfather and to every daughter of divorce who doesn’t try to use friends’ boyfriends to soothe her ego.)

The problem, of course, is that this version of Carolyn has no flaws — or that any faults are uncharacteristic, or justified because of the actions of other people. This strips Carolyn of the capacity for self-awareness, maturity and growth, making everything that happened next a tragedy outside her control.

Myth has it that Carolyn and John met while jogging in Central Park. Beller writes that the two were introduced when he came into Calvin Klein’s headquarters in 1992, and they began a brief, turbulent romance. John broke up with her after receiving a letter from a friend claiming that she was a “user, partier, that she was out for fame and fortune.” Carolyn was down but not out: “She also knew, deep down, that this would not be the end,” a friend told Beller. “John was a prize and Carolyn had her eye on the ball.” Another said Carolyn wanted an “important life,” and she thought she could have that with John.

They renewed the romance in earnest two years later — shortly after Jackie died — and picked up where they left off: two people addicted to each other and the drama they constantly brought to the relationship. When he was an hour late for a dinner date, she threw a glass of wine in his face and stormed out. By early 1996, engaged and living together, the two were filmed having a huge fight in Washington Square Park. The tabloids had a field day; it was a massive embarrassment for John, who had just launched George magazine, and a realization for Carolyn that the spotlight was never turning off.

Whatever doubts they had were pushed aside: Their wedding in September — pulled off in secret — was a sensational fairy tale, complete with one of the most romantic photos in history. The groom was 35, the bride 30.

But two people can be deeply in love and wrong for each other. John, born into a rarefied world of suffocating fame and fortune, was earnest, loving, spoiled, careless, struggling with ADHD and dyslexia, and sensitive to any intellectual slight. He was accustomed to a world eager to give him whatever he wanted. Beller may describe Carolyn as generous, funny and thoughtful, but her heroine also comes across as spoiled, headstrong and insecure. Her insistence on living her life as she wished — including a husband who was an equal partner — was at odds with the man and history she married.

One of the many unexplored questions in this book is the naiveté on both John’s and Carolyn’s part about what was likely to happen when they married. They believed that the media interest would die after the wedding; it intensified. “John and Carolyn were woefully under-managed for their outsize life,” a friend of John’s told Beller. “They needed aides-de-camp. They needed security. And they should probably have moved away from that building.” But the couple continued to live in John’s downtown loft — with no doorman and one exit — where photographers could catch them coming and going.

Everything the newlyweds did in public was scrutinized: They were the undisputed stars at any gala they attended. Carolyn was hailed one of the most fashionable women in the world. But a ski trip to Bozeman, Mont., also made headlines when she wore boots with four-inch heels and the locals laughed at her. Beller attributes it to “jealousy or just plain cattiness — it was the age-old tradition of women turning on women.” So, not just the patriarchy.

Carolyn quit her job to be available for her husband, then found herself bored and resentful of all the people and things that demanded his time. She blamed the paparazzi for her unhappiness — and Beller concurs. John grew up with photographers and had a cordial relationship; Carolyn was never reconciled to the constant presence of cameras or the request for one smile. “No!” she told a Kennedy family friend. “I hate those bastards. I’d rather just scream and curse at them.” It became a vicious cycle — she was angry, the photos were angry, and Carolyn once even spat at a photographer. Perhaps had she lived longer she would have learned — like Princess Diana — to leverage her fame for good.

Maybe Carolyn was clinically depressed, but Beller doesn’t explore the question of mental health and the pressures of being a celebrity. She does say, near the end of the book, that Carolyn was prescribed antidepressants, and that by the spring of 1999 the marriage was in shambles and the couple were in counseling. “She was pretty angry,” said a longtime friend of the couple’s. “But, at a certain point, you have to slow down and ask yourself, ‘Do I want to be in constant outrage?’ Because you can’t grow in that state.”

John confided in friends that his wife refused to have sex with him and that he believed she was doing drugs. The persistent rumors that Carolyn had a problem with cocaine are left largely unexamined. Beller repeatedly says Carolyn never touched the stuff; she quotes one friend who says she “barely drank wine.” In the same vein, Carolyn’s alleged affairs are dismissed as mere friendships. John, on the other hand, may have been unfaithful, but his “infidelity came from pain.”

In July 1999, John persuaded Carolyn to accompany him to his cousin’s wedding at the Kennedy compound on Cape Cod. Her sister Lauren, who had brokered a reconciliation of sorts, flew along in John’s small plane with a planned drop-off on Martha’s Vineyard. The plane went down shortly after dark off the Massachusetts coast; there were no survivors.

In her epilogue, Beller asks whether any woman who married JFK Jr. would have elicited this obsession and tells herself no — Carolyn was “fascinating, intriguing, exasperating … a revelation.” For the rest of us, she is a cautionary tale, and this book a lesson in the perils of celebrity worship.

Once Upon a Time

The Captivating Life of Carolyn Bessette-Kennedy

By Elizabeth Beller

Gallery. 352 pp. $26.99

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1907 Was a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World

In “The Race to the Future,” Kassia St. Clair chronicles the 8,000-mile caper that helped change the landscape forever.

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By Peter Sagal

Peter Sagal is the host of NPR’s “Wait Wait … Don’t Tell Me!” His latest book is “The Incomplete Book of Running.”

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THE RACE TO THE FUTURE: 8,000 Miles to Paris — the Adventure That Accelerated the Twentieth Century, by Kassia St. Clair

Berkeley Heights, N.J., was once a verdant expanse of farmland and forests, but by the time I grew up there, all that had long been paved over to build suburban homes. So I spent most of my time inside, watching movies on TV.

One of my favorites was 1965’s “The Great Race,” in which Tony Curtis’s handsome hero vies with Jack Lemmon’s sneering villain in a round-the-world, old-timey car race. Although I didn’t know it at the time, that movie was based on real events, including the 1907 Peking-Paris rally, in which five drivers attempted to cover a vast distance in machines so new their very name — automobile? motor car? — hadn’t yet been decided.

Kassia St. Clair’s “The Race to the Future” is a vivid re-creation of the escapade, but the author also takes pains to demonstrate how what happened then determined the way we live now — including why the orchards of my hometown are remembered now only as street signs.

In 1907, when the French newspaper Le Matin announced that it would sponsor and publicize an 8,000-mile race from what was known as Peking (now Beijing) to Paris, automobiles were still a rare sight.

Engineers had been dreaming of a self-propelled vehicle since the dawn of the machine age, and by the end of the 19th century, scores of tinkerers and industrialists were vying to create a practical working model. Much like today’s digital engineers, inventors could envision what their machines could do before they knew how to make them do it, and were generally blind to the consequences.

Expensive and scarce, automobiles were still seen as playthings of the rich and eccentric — and the race did little to dispel this perception. The imperious Italian Prince Scipione Borghese, in his personal Itala motor car, and the French-born Charles Godard, raffish and unscrupulous, in a Dutch Spyker he somehow persuaded the company’s owner to lend him, emerge as the principal rivals.

The other participants, including drivers, mechanics and journalists, fade in comparison to those two larger-than-life characters — with the possible exception of one Auguste Pons, who barely made it out of Peking before his lightweight three-wheeled vehicle failed, and then spent the two months it took for the others to complete the race complaining that they hadn’t turned back to help.

With apologies for spoiling a race that took place more than a century ago, Borghese’s victory seemed inevitable from almost the first day, so the question that kept me glued to the book was, Who will survive? The terrain the racers traversed was a near-roadless wilderness dotted by remote settlements; gasoline had to be sent ahead by train or horse.

On the first day, the drivers had to attack the walls of ancient mountain paths with pickaxes so their machines could pass through. Godard and the journalist accompanying him almost died of exposure after they ran out of fuel in the Gobi Desert.

But as dangerous as the racers’ path was, as devoid of comfort and shelter, I found myself yearning to see that world as they saw it, long before it looked like everywhere else. Every time the competitors reached a Siberian settlement that today is a mass of concrete apartment blocks, or came to a river still wild and uncrossable, or encountered a now-vanished culture on the taiga, I wanted to stand athwart the race, yelling, “Stop!” Or at least, slow down. Even as the racers look for carpenters in the Urals to repair their smashed wooden wheels, the book returns again and again to the promise — or threat — of the massive transformations to come.

St. Clair interlaces chapters on the race with snapshots from the era: Russia and China in the last days of their decadent empires before revolutionaries demanded to join the modern world; Western industrialists trying to make fortunes in the new kingdom of “motordom.” Here, in short, are the choices made then, few of them wise, that we’re stuck with today.

Before the oil industry and armaments makers imposed gasoline as the fuel of choice, many car designers preferred electric motors, especially because then (as now) most people drove less than 100 miles a day. But then (as now) electric cars were seen as less manly, less rugged — and we couldn’t have that. The Detroit Electric car company withered until it finally went out of business in 1939, even though one of their most loyal customers was Clara Ford, wife of Henry.

None of it was inevitable. None of it was, as we are often told, a natural result of the human urge for freedom and open spaces. The triumph of the petroleum-fueled automobile, and the complete transformation it wrought on our physical world, was caused by many things — including the inspiring dash and daring of the transcontinental racers. But in the end, the true catalyst was a succession of powerful men deciding that whatever the rest of us actually wanted, our real destiny was to make them very, very rich.

As it happened, I read this whole book on two different airplanes, as I flew from my home in Chicago to New York City and back in one day. Reading about people struggling to lever their technological marvels across a river before the sun went down while I traversed 2,000 miles in a few hours made me feel both privileged and forlorn. What would it have been like to actually travel those miles, rather than erase them?

Once I landed back in Chicago, I got into my car, which, despite its sophisticated engineering, was essentially the same machine as the Itala and the Spyker. I exited the airport, merged onto the highway that had been blasted through farms and fields, and was home so soon it was as if I had never left at all.

THE RACE TO THE FUTURE : 8,000 Miles to Paris — the Adventure That Accelerated the Twentieth Century | By Kassia St. Clair | Liveright | 384 pp. | $24.99

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Review: Stephen King knows 'You Like It Darker' and obliges with sensational new tales

After 50 years, Stephen King knows his Constant Readers all too well. In fact, it’s right there in the title of the legendary master of horror’s latest collection of stories: “ You Like It Darker .” 

Heck yeah, Uncle Stevie, we do like it darker. Obviously so does King, who’s crafted an iconic career of keeping folks up at night either turning pages and/or trying to hide from their own creeped-out imagination. The 12 tales of “Darker” (Scribner, 512 pp., ★★★½ out of four) are an assortment of tried-and-true King staples, with stories that revisit the author’s old haunts – one being a clever continuation of an old novel – and a mix of genres from survival frights to crime drama (a favorite of King’s in recent years). It’s like a big bag of Skittles: Each one goes down different but they’re all pretty tasty.

And thoughtful as well. King writes in “You Like It Darker” – a play on a Leonard Cohen song – that with the supernatural and paranormal yarns he spins, “I have tried especially hard to show the real world as it is." With the opener “Two Talented Bastids,” King takes on an intriguing, grounded tale of celebrity: A son of a famous writer finally digs into the real reason behind how his father and his dad’s best friend suddenly went from landfill owners to renowned artists overnight.

That story’s bookended by “The Answer Man,” which weaves together Americana and the otherwordly. Over the course of several decades, a lawyer finds himself at major turning points, and the same strange guy shows up to answer his big questions (needing payment, of course), in a surprisingly emotional telling full of small-town retro charm and palpable dread.

With some stories, King mines sinister aspects in life’s more mundane corners. “The Fifth Step” centers on a sanitation engineer has a random and fateful meeting on a park bench with an addict working his way through sobriety, with one heck of a slowburn reveal. A family dinner is the seemingly quaint setting for twisty “Willie the Weirdo,” about a 10-year-old misfit who only confides in his dying grandpa. And in the playfully quirky mistaken-identity piece “Finn,” a truly unlucky teenager is simply walking home alone when wrong place and wrong time lead to a harrowing journey.

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A couple entries lean more sci-fi: “Red Screen” features a cop investigating a wife’s murder, with her husband claiming she was possessed; while in “The Turbulence Expert,” a man named Craig Dixon gets called into work, his office is an airplane and his job is far from easy. There’s also some good old-fashioned cosmic terror with “The Dreamers,” starring a Vietnam vet and his scientist boss' experiments that go terrifyingly awry. The 76-year-old King notably offers up some spry elderly heroes, too. One finds himself in harm’s way during a family road trip in “On Slide Inn Road,” where a signed Ted Williams bat takes center stage, and “Laurie” chronicles an aging widower and his new canine companion running afoul of a ticked-off alligator.

'Carrie' turns 50: Ranking iconic author Stephen King's best books turned films

King epics like “It” and “The Stand” are so huge the books double as doorstops, yet the author has a long history of exceptional short fiction, including the likes of “The Body,” “Rita Hayworth and Shawshank Redemption” and “The Life of Chuck” (from the stellar 2020 collection “If It Bleeds” ). And with “Darker,” it’s actually the two lengthier entries that are the greatest hits.

“Rattlesnakes” is a sequel of sorts to King’s 1981 novel "Cujo," where reptiles are more central to what happens than an unhinged dog. Decades after his son’s death and a divorce results from an incident involving a rabid Saint Bernard, Vic Trenton is retired and living at a friend’s mansion in the Florida Keys when a meeting with a neighbor leads to unwanted visits from youthful specters. It both brings a little healing catharsis to a traumatizing read ("Cujo" definitely sticks with you) and opens up a new wound with unnerving bite.

Then there’s the 152-page “Danny Coughlin’s Bad Dream,” which leans more into King’s recent noir detective/procedural era. School janitor Danny gets a psychic vision of a girl who’s been murdered and he tries to do the right thing by informing the police. But that’s when the nightmare really begins, as he becomes a prime suspect and has his life torn asunder by the most obsessed cop this side of Javert. Danny’s all too ready to be his Valjean, a compelling sturdy personality who fights back hard – and the best King character since fan-favorite private eye Holly Gibney .

“Horror stories are best appreciated by those who are compassionate and empathetic,” King writes in his afterword. And with “You Like It Darker,” he proves once more that his smaller-sized tales pack as powerful a wallop as the big boys.

‘Oh, Canada’ Review: Paul Schrader Separates the Art From the Artist in Prismatic Portrait of a Dying Director

Toning down his typically confrontational style, Schrader reunites with Richard Gere (40-odd years after 'American Gigolo') to capture the career-reassessing soul of Russell Banks' next-to-last book.

By Peter Debruge

Peter Debruge

Chief Film Critic

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Straying from the hotheaded “Taxi Driver” style that has dominated much of his career, Paul Schrader pays ruminative and respectful tribute to his late friend, novelist Russell Banks, who gave the writer-director the raw material for one of his best films, “Affliction” — and now, for one of his best films in years. Adapted from Banks’ “Foregone” (and given the title the author told Schrader he wanted for the book), “Oh, Canada” presents a dying artist’s final testimony as a multifaceted film-within-a-film, honoring Banks while also revealing so many of Schrader’s own thoughts on mortality.

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As Leonard sits for the camera, he shows zero interest in his legacy — the thing that drives so many young artists. He’s agreed to do this interview for Emma’s benefit, demanding that she be in the room (peripheral at first, Thurman proves every bit as strong as the role requires). In theory, Malcolm will ask the questions, but in practice, Leonard directs the shoot, responding for his wife’s benefit — and therein lies the soul of this profound if slightly scattered film.

What do these widescreen vignettes represent: the truth? Leonard’s memories? Or are they a more literal representation of what he shares with the cameras, which might be distorted or outright invented, considering his condition? The answer doesn’t really matter as Schrader builds a mosaic of Leonard’s life, cutting back to the aged director at times, as he stubbornly insists on being honest with them, with himself, with us.

Playing out like omniscient (if potentially unreliable) B-roll, the flashbacks come in a bit of a jumble. Leonard starts by talking about a moment in his second marriage when he and his pregnant wife Alicia (Kristine Froseth) were about to buy a house in Vermont. Days before Leonard was supposed to deliver the down payment, his wealthy father-in-law made a proposition to run the family business. At that point, Leonard dreamed of being a novelist. He was not one to be tied down, as another, earlier series of flashbacks (these in black and white) depict.

Leonard’s entire reputation has been founded on the myth that he fled the United States for Canada, as either a draft dodger or a conscientious objector. The truth isn’t quite so romantic — in fact, it’s downright anti-romantic, as Leonard describes a lifelong pattern of walking out on women. (At one point, he admits to seducing Diana.) In addition to Leonard’s narration, “Oh, Canada” privileges the voice of his abandoned son, Cornel (Zach Shaffer), whom he strategically neglected to mention to Emma during their more-than-30-year marriage.

Feeling death looming, Leonard needs to come clean. He likens the process of doing this interview to praying (“Whether or not you believe in God, you don’t lie when you pray,” he says), but it’s more of a confession, and a somewhat confused one at that, given the film’s prismatic and audaciously nonlinear structure. It probably doesn’t help that Gere is constantly popping up in scenes set in the ’60s. Now in his 70s — and notoriously outspoken on social media — Schrader has been quite public about his personal health issues. With this film, he confronts the ugly and seemingly unjust truth of dying.

Once driven by his loins, Leonard does his interview with a urostomy bag hanging by his side. When the young female intern leans in to attach his mic, Leonard takes a deep whiff (classier than the cliché where he might look down her blouse). How difficult it must have been for this incorrigible womanizer to get older, how necessary in satisfying his libido that false legend surely was. Now, he has no need to sustain it. From Emma, he seeks not forgiveness but greater intimacy.

This is ultimately Banks’ story, though one can feel Schrader weaving his own ideas into Leonard’s worldview, as America’s most eschatological living director shares insights into this cultural moment, when countless artists have been called out for bad behavior. How many have escaped this moral reckoning? Here, Leonard brings that scrutiny upon himself, exposing his shortcomings in a way that, should Malcolm’s movie ever come out, would surely undermine his reputation, to which Schrader asks: Is the role of art to be respectable? Can it really ever be honest?

Reviewed at Cannes Film Festival (Competition), May 17, 2024. Running time: 94 MIN.

• Production: An Arclight Films International presentation of a Northern Lights, Vested Interest, Ottocento, Left Home Prods. production, in association with Exemplary Films, Carte Blanche Entertainment, One Two Twenty Entertainment, Sipur Studios. Producers: Tiffany Boyle, Luisa Law, Meghan Hanlon, Scott Lastaiti, David Gonzales. Executive producers: Gary Hamilton, Jon Adgemi, Ryan Hamilton, John Molloy, Brian Beckmann, Andrea Chung Ying Ye, Rob Hinderliter, Caerthan Banks, Riccardo Maddalosso, Steven D. Kravitz, Joel Michaely, Terri Garbarini, Steven Demmler, Tom Ogden, Damiano Tucci, Andrea Bucko, Kathryn M. Moseley, Braxton Pope, Oliver Ridge Elsa Ramo, R. Wesley Sierk Emilio Schenker, Kyle Stroud, Arun K. Thapar, Eyal Rimmon, Gideon Tadmor. Co-executive producers: Bill Way, Susan Beer, Elliott Whitton, Yuwei Du Sophia Banks, Divya Shahani, Judd Erlich, Aman Thapar, Yuchuan Cao, Jay Brunley, Tiziano Tucci.
• Crew: Director, writer: Paul Schrader, based on the novel “Foregone” by Russell Banks. Camera: Andrew Wonder. Editors: Benjamin Rodriguez Jr.Music: Phosphorescent. Music supervisor: Dina Juntila.
• With: Richard Gere, Uma Thurman, Michael Imperioli, Jacob Elordi.

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