With incredible clarity and in vivid detail, this 10-year Navy veteran, explains and involves you in the action of the times ... the Cold War in the Pacific Ocean during the mid to late 1950’s from Boot Camp and basic training, to service aboard a U.S. Navy Destroyer: the USS Theodore Edson Chandler (DD-717). Enjoy liberty ashore in Foreign ports in this first book of his trilogy; From Sand to Sea and Distant Shores. Be his shipmate as you: • Endure tear gas, an oil fire and nearly getting drowned during Basic Training. • Become one of the crew of a five-inch gun turret, when a buddy loader drops a live projectile while firing. • Experience A ONE IN A MILLION HAPPENING! the in-your-face terror of a full-blown typhoon that threatens to capsize your ship as a shipmate gets washed overboard ... Then back onboard again! • Learn everything a destroyer does from Gunnery and sub-chasing to stopping weapons-smuggling in the Formosa Strait. • Enjoy exchanges of American life styles and customs, as you live and eat with shipmates from New York to Tennessee. • Almost panic, when not only officers from your ship, but the Captain too; decide to throw you overboard at night into the black-as-ink waters of Subic Bay, P.I. and you can’t SWIM! You won’t have to have been or be, a sailor nor even in the Navy to read and understand this book! Explanations, foot notes and “Backgrounds” will make it clear for you to move through without stumbling (if you can catch your breath!)

"Book club favorites, reader's guide"--Cover.

NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • “Hannah examines whether love and commitment are enough to sustain a marriage when two people who have put their individual dreams on ice get a chance to defrost them . . . in fast-moving prose punctuated by snappy asides.”—People Elizabeth and Jackson Shore married young, raised two daughters, and weathered the storms of youth as they built a family. From a distance, their lives look picture perfect. But after the girls leave home, Jack and Elizabeth quietly drift apart. When Jack accepts a wonderful new job, Elizabeth puts her own needs aside to follow him across the country. Then tragedy turns Elizabeth’s world upside down. In the aftermath, she questions everything about her life—her choices, her marriage, even her long-forgotten dreams. In a daring move that shocks her husband, friends, and daughters, she lets go of the woman she has become—and reaches out for the woman she wants to be.

A narrative reminiscent of Phileas Fogg meets Professor Challenger, featuring the exploits of scientist-cum-adventurer Doctor Ludweg Phinagler, as recorded by his (semi-)faithful assistant, Fosse. A maverick academic, Phinagler, mounts a series of expeditions, confronting ancient mysteries and deadly dangers.

From the New York Times bestselling author of The Last Painting of Sara de Vos comes a sweeping historical novel set amid the skyscrapers of 1890s Chicago and the far-flung islands of the South Pacific. In the waning years of the nineteenth century there was a hunger for tribal artifacts, spawning collecting voyages from museums and collectors around the globe. In 1897, one such collector, a Chicago insurance magnate, sponsors an expedition into the South Seas to commemorate the completion of his company's new skyscraper—the world's tallest building. The ship is to bring back an array of Melanesian weaponry and handicrafts, but also several natives related by blood. Caught up in this scheme are two orphans—Owen Graves, an itinerant trader from Chicago's South Side who has recently proposed to the girl he must leave behind, and Argus Niu, a mission houseboy in the New Hebrides who longs to be reunited with his sister. At the cusp of the twentieth century, the expedition forces a collision course between the tribal and the civilized, between two young men plagued by their respective and haunting pasts. An epic and ambitious story that brings to mind E.L. Doctorow, with echoes of Melville and Robert Louis Stevenson, Bright and Distant Shores is a wondrous achievement by a writer known for creating compelling fiction from the fabric of history.

The decades after the War of 1812 were years of introspection for the fledgling American republic. Having twice prevailed against the military might of Great Britain, there was now no power on Earth ready, willing, and able to take on the United States. As America entered the 1840s and began expanding its dominion over North America and opening lucrative overseas markets in Asia and elsewhere, all that was needed to secure its place in the world was an alliance with a like-minded nation with the naval resources to guarantee the integrity of global trade routes and the financial rewards accruing to both parties of such an alliance. Captain Richard Cutler commands the new United States steam frigate Suwannee on a mission to the South Seas to the distant shores of New Zealand.