Make More Movies Set on Old Wooden Ships

In the journalist David Grann’s latest nonfiction book, The Wager, the voyage of an 18th-century British Royal Navy vessel unfolds with all the grisliness of a David Cronenberg movie. Hundreds of sailors, packed like sardines in the bowels of the HMS Wager, succumbed to typhus and scurvy: a fate that weary survivors found relatively merciful compared to the constant barrage of waves hammering the ship during its attempted passage around Cape Horn. (Even for modern seagoers, Cape Horn is considered one of the most treacherous routes in the world.) The Wager makes life aboard the boat seem like hell on earth, but despite all the stomach-turning details, the book is impossible to put down. I would compare the experience to a slow-motion trainwreck, but a slow-motion shipwreck is more apt: After all, the real meat of the account comes when the Wager breaks apart on an uninhabited island and the castaways split into factions before devising a mutiny. The story only gets wilder from there; for lovers of Dad Television, I strongly endorse The Wager as a quintessential Dad Book.