Meet the Author: Eric Jay Dolin

On Sunday, June 2, 2024, it was all hands on deck for this exciting author event!

Darien Library, along with Barrett Bookstore and Darien Power Squadron welcomed Eric Jay Dolin, who discussed his new book, "Left For Dead: Shipwreck, Treachery, and Survival at the Edge of the World."

In "Left for Dead," Eric Jay Dolin tells the true story of a wild and fateful encounter between an American sealing vessel, a shipwrecked British brig, and a British warship in the Falkland archipelago during the War of 1812.

Fraught with misunderstandings and mistrust, the incident left three British sailors and two Americans, including the captain of the sealer, Charles H. Barnard, abandoned in the barren, windswept, and inhospitable Falklands for a year and a half. With deft narrative skill and unequaled knowledge of the very pith of the seafaring life, Dolin describes in vivid and harrowing detail the increasingly desperate existence of the castaways during their eighteen-month ordeal—an all-too-common fate in the Great Age of Sail.

A tale of intriguing complexity, with surprising twists and turns throughout—involving greed, lying, bullying, a hostile takeover, stellar leadership, ingenuity, severe privation, endurance, banishment, the great value of a dog, the birth of a baby, a perilous thousand-mile open-ocean journey in a seventeen-foot boat, an improbable rescue mission, and legal battles over a dubious and disgraceful wartime prize— Left for Dead shows individuals in wartime under great duress acting both nobly and atrociously, and offers a unique perspective on a pivotal era in American maritime history.

About Eric Jay Dolin
Eric Jay Dolin is the author of sixteen books, including "Leviathan: The History of Whaling in America," which was chosen as one of the best nonfiction books of 2007 by the "Los Angeles Times" and the "Boston Globe," and also won the 2007 John Lyman Award for U.S. Maritime History. His most recent book before "Left for Dead" is "Rebels at Sea: Privateering in the American Revolution," which was awarded the Fraunces Tavern Museum Book Award and the Samuel Eliot Morison Book Award for Naval Literature. Before "Rebels" came "A Furious Sky: The Five-Hundred-Year History of America’s Hurricanes," which was a finalist for the Kirkus Prize, and was chosen as one of the 50 notable books of non-fiction of the year by "The Washington Post," and as one of the Best Science & Technology Books of 2020 by the "Library Journal" and "Booklist." Dolin lives in Marblehead, Massachusetts, with his family. You can learn more about him and his books at his website -- http://www.ericjaydolin.com.