Wager

Fundamentally a history book, but written with enough narrative to feel like a novel. I'm not sure whether it's better classed as tragedy or horror: the fevered dreams of empire, the cruelty of feudalism-cum-capitalism, the menace of typhoid and scurvy, the genocide of colonialism, the hypocrisy of Christianity, the animistic forces of hunger and thirst...

Yet as skillfully as Nabokov in "Lolita", Grann's explanation of this world and its logic, the real characters and their motivations, succeeded in getting me to empathize with them all: none angels, none demons.

The technical details of the different situations are described in vivid detail: how the men-at-war (battle ships) were created and organized into "floating castles", how the survivors of the ship-wrecks set up camp, and how the Kawésqar people — who saved the survivors time-and-again — lead their lives.

The organizational and legal details were particularly interesting. That "the captain goes down with the ship" for instance, meaning they leave last, making sure to get all else off first - this being the practical bargain the captain makes in having complete authority.

Very horrible. Couldn't stop reading.

Very well written and, after a somewhat slow start, gets the reader very interested in the personalities and story. Cheap, Bulkeley, and Byron were all well drawn and distinct.

I enjoyed the novelistic history format and the tighter focus compared to Killers of the Flower Moon, and I was thinking four stars right up until the last fifth or so. The trial is a fizzling anticlimax. I get that it's a history book and Grann can't change what happened, but he chose the subject and the structure of the book. The trial felt like a let down after all the buildup of the shipwreck and the conflicting accounts.