Lifeboat - Softcover

As with Mark Kurlansky's Cod or Charles Corn's Scents of Eden, in the right hands a thing, trade, or practice traced through a century or two provides another window on history, small but very clear, and from an angle just enough to one side to bring other events into a new perspective. The lifeboat is the MacGuffin for Stilgoe's plot, and it brings a great deal into view.... Lifeboat is a majestic, prodigious, mighty book. --John CaseyNational Book Award-winning, author of Spartina With a voice that is knowing and nautical, John Stilgoe leads readers along a salt-encrusted time line of the evolution of lifeboats. Lifeboat is a fascinating and meticulously researched work to be enjoyed by seafarers and history buffs alike. --Linda Greenlaw, author of The Lobster Chronicles and The Hungry Ocean [A] fascinating meditation on survival. --New York Times

Woven through ""Lifeboat"" are good old-fashioned yarns and thrilling tales of adventure that will quicken the pulse of readers who have enjoyed the novels of Patrick O'Brian, ""Crabwalk"" by Gunter Grass, or works of nonfiction such as ""The Perfect Storm"" and ""In the Heart of the Sea"". But Stilgoe, whose other works have plumbed suburban culture, locomotives, and the shore, is ultimately after bigger fish. Through the humble, much-ignored lifeboat, its design and navigation and the stories of its ultimate purpose, he has found a peculiar lens on roughly the past two centuries of human history, particularly the war-tossed, technology-driven history of man and the sea.