Ships & Shipbuilding

On May 1, 1915, with WWI entering its tenth month, a luxury ocean liner as richly appointed as an English country house sailed out of New York, bound for Liverpool, carrying a record number of children and infants....

A major literary event: a never-before-published work from the author of the American classic Their Eyes Were Watching God that brilliantly illuminates the horror and injustices of slavery as it tells the true story of one of the last known survivors of the Atlantic slave trade....

New York Times bestselling author Hampton Sides returns with a white-knuckle tale of polar exploration and survival in the Gilded Age....

The Titanic collided with an iceberg on April 14, and 1,500 people died in the freezing waters. It's a story that has spurred legends and still sends shivers down the spine....

The story begins in 1629, when the pride of the Dutch East India Company, the Batavia, is on its maiden voyage en route from Amsterdam to the Dutch East Indies, laden down with the greatest treasure to leave Holland....

The men on the SS Marine Electric sailed into a storm in February 1983 not knowing that they would make history - at a great cost in lives....

Stalking the Red Bear, for the first time ever, describes the action principally from the perspective of a commanding officer of a nuclear submarine during the Cold War....

Deadliest Sea by Kalee Thompson is the spellbinding true story of the greatest rescue in US Coast Guard history. Recounting the tragic sinking of the fishing trawler, Alaska Ranger, in the Bering Sea and its remarkable aftermath in March 2008....

A few minutes before midnight on April 14, 1912, the "unsinkable" RMS Titanic, on her maiden voyage to New York, struck an iceberg....

From best-selling author John U. Bacon, a gripping narrative history of the largest manmade detonation prior to Hiroshima....

An immersive account of a tragedy at sea whose repercussions haunt its survivors to this day....

Titanic's Last Secrets peers into the lives of scientists, financiers, and industrialists to bring listeners a thrilling and revelatory work of history and contemporary adventure....

On October 1, 2015, Hurricane Joaquin barreled into the Bermuda Triangle and swallowed the container ship El Faro whole, resulting in the worst American shipping disaster in 35 years....

In the grand tradition of David McCullough and Ron Chernow, the sweeping story of the 19th-century American dynasties who battled for dominance of the tea and opium trades....

Drawing on decades of experience, Gibbins reveals the riches beneath the waves and shows us how the treasures found there can be a porthole to the past that tell a new story about the world and its underwater secrets.

A heart-stopping true-life tale of maritime disaster,survival, and daring rescue from a master storyteller....

The Shipwreck Hunter chronicles David L. Mearns' most intriguing finds. It describes the extraordinary techniques used, the detailed research, and the courage required to find a wreck thousands of feet beneath the sea, plus the moving human stories that lie behind these tragedies....

A vivid narrative history of the Mayflower and of the Winslow family, who traveled to America in search of a new world....

It was one of the most traumatic events in maritime history, and Archibald Gracie was probably among the last to leave the sinking Titanic on that cold April night in 1912....

He gathered his crew of four, readied his 49-foot steel boat, the Can Do, and entered the maelstrom of the blizzard that was to become known as the "Storm of the Century"....

Even if we live within sight of the sea, it is easy to forget that our world is an ocean world....

The modern listener is given a seat in the whale boat of Owen Chase as he and his fellow crew and their captain make way in three boats after the wreckage of the Whaleship Essex....

Elliot Rappaport, a professional captain of traditional sailing ships, has spent three decades at sea, where understanding weather is crucial to the safety of vessels and their crews. In Reading the Glass, he offers a sailor’s-eye view of the moving parts of our atmosphere....

The fearsome wrath of the storms that brew over the Great Lakes has challenged and defeated some of the staunchest vessels constructed in the shipyards of port cities along the US and Canadian lakeshores. Richard Gebhart tells the tales of some of these ships and their captains and crews....

In Graveyard of the Lakes, Thompson suggests that most of the accidents and deaths on the lakes have been the result of human error, ranging from simple mistakes to gross incompetence....