Taken from this month's "GOOD OLD BOAT" Magazine:
Favorite books
We have no book reviews this month so we asked one of our favorite novelists, Bill Hammond (
http://www.bill-hammond.com/), what five books he's read in the last few years, other than his own Cutler Family Chronicles series, that he would recommend to Good Old Boat readers. Here's his list:
Sea Witch by Helen Hollick (Silverwood Books, 2011)
London born and bred, Helen Hollick is one of the most prolific writers of the British perspective during the Age of Sail. In this novel, protagonist Jeremiah Acorne serves as a captain of a pirate ship and lives up to his billing as a swashbuckling man of the sea. In her descriptive and unique style, Ms. Hollick draws the reader irresistibly into the Golden Age of Piracy in a way that is oddly moving.
Until the Sea Shall Give Up Her Dead by S. Thomas Russell (Penguin, 2014)
This novel is the fourth volume in the Charles Hayden series. In the late 18th century, Hayden, a Royal Navy officer, is sent to the Caribbean where a hodgepodge of conflicting British, French, and Spanish interests interact with revolutionaries and pirates. As always, Russell's style is disciplined and engaging; one can almost smell the salt of the sea air blended with the acrid stench of spent gunpowder.
Surfmen by C.T. Marshall (Fireship Press, 2013)
As a young boy, the protagonist is rescued at sea off the Outer Banks of North Carolina. Thirty years later, a decade after the close of the Civil War, this same young man, grown to manhood, launches The Cape Hatteras Station of the U.S. Lifesaving Service, and battles the treachery of the infamous Diamond Shoals and that of his crew.
Across a Moonlit Sea by Marsha Canham (Amazon, 2011)
A rollicking good sea saga set in Elizabethan England, this novel, the first in a trilogy, features a pack of privateers, known as sea hawks, who band together to protect their island and their queen from the ravages of the Grand Armada being assembled in Spain by King Phillip II. Included in the riotous action is a raid on Cadiz led by the Pirate Wolf Simon Dante and Sir Francis Drake.
The Sea Was Always There by Joseph Callo (Fireship Press, 2012)
In this autobiographical work, retired Rear Admiral Joseph Callo writes about what the sea has meant to him and especially what it has taught him, from his earliest recollections on Cape Cod and Jones Beach, through two years of distinguished service in the U.S. Navy, to sailing adventures in exotic waters worldwide. Everyone who has ever had a love affair with the sea will see himself or herself in these pages.
I'm reading IMPACT by Douglas Preston (Forge Book, Tom Doherty Associates, LLC, 2009)
It's a new frontier thriller involving the CIA, a meteor, the daughter of a lobster fisherman, and NASA scientists. It's an interesting, quick read.
Good reading.
stuck under several inches of snow, I thought now would be a good time to read some sailing literature while I wait for spring.
