"Widely acknowledged as the first English novel, Daniel Defoe's adventure story of a shipwrecked sailor became an instant classic upon its publication in 1719 and the yardstick for countless castaway narratives to follow." "Robinson Crusoe, an English sailor, finds himself marooned on a desert island after the rest of his shipmates drown in a terrible wreck. He survives on the island for nearly three decades, domesticating livestock, cultivating plants,...

On one level a simple adventure story. The main character is ship-wrecked on an island. The novel also raises profound questions about moral and spiritual values, society, and man's abiding acquisitiveness.

Describes, in easy-to-read text, the disastrous 1912 sinking of the world's largest ocean liner after colliding with an iceberg during its maiden voyage.

In 1819, the 238-ton Essex set sail from Nantucket on a routine voyage to hunt whales. Fifteen months later the Essex was rammed and sunk by an enraged sperm whale. Fearing cannibals on the islands to the west, the 20-man crew set out in three small boats for South America, almost 3,000 miles away. Three months later, only eight were left alive. This book shares a fantastic saga of survival and adventure, steeped in the lore of the whaling tradition,...

"The SS Arcadia vanished during a routine voyage. A strange, garbled emergency message was broadcast, but no trace of the ship, or of its crew, could be found. Sixty years later, its wreck has finally been discovered more than three hundred miles from its intended course. A small team are granted permission to dive to it. Their purpose is straightforward: explore the wreck, film everything, and, if possible, uncover how and why the supposedly unsinkable...

"Adrift in a dinghy, Edward Prendick, the single survivor from the good ship Lady Vain, is rescued by a vessel carrying a profoundly unusual cargo - a menagerie of savage animals. Nursed to recovery by the keeper Montgomery, who gives him dark medicine that tastes of blood, Prendick soon finds himself stranded upon an uncharted island in the Pacific with his rescuer and the beasts. Here, he meets Montgomery's master, the sinister Doctor Moreau - a...

' Before The Perfect Storm, before In the Heart of the Sea, Steven Callahan's dramatic tale of survival at sea was on the New York Times bestseller list for more than thirty-six weeks. In some ways the model for the new wave of adventure books, Adrift is an undeniable seafaring classic, a riveting firsthand account by the only man known to have survived more than a month alone at sea, fighting for his life in an inflatable raft after his small sloop...

Martel's novel tells the story of Pi--short for Piscine--an unusual boy raised in a zoo in India. Pi's father decides to move the family to live in Canada and sell the animals to the great zoos of America. The ship taking them across the Pacific sinks and Pi finds himself the sole human survivor on a lifeboat with a hyena, an orangutan, a zebra with a broken leg and Bengal tiger called Richard Parker. Life of Pi brings together many themes including...

"No other ship in history has attracted so much attention, stirred up such powerful emotion, or accumulated as many legends and myths as Titanic. "Unsinkable" is a fresh look at this incredible story, one that centers on the people who built the ship, crewed her, and sailed on her. It follows the great ship as she grows on the ways at Harland & Wolff in Belfast, sails from Southampton toward her unexpected rendezvous with an iceberg, then slowly sinks...

"Adrift in a raft after a deadly ship explosion, nine people struggle for survival at sea. Three days pass. Short on water, food and hope, they spot a man floating in the waves. They pull him in. 'Thank the Lord we found you,' a passenger says. 'I am the Lord,' the man whispers....In The Stranger in the Lifeboat, Albom keeps us guessing until the end: Is this strange and quiet man really who he claims to be? What actually happened to cause the explosion?...