David Grann

David Grann is one of a very select club of writers: those whose books of history are so diverting that they almost seem implausible. Their narrative constructions are so effective, the dialogue so apposite, that jaded readers might think everything has been made up or twisted to give the books life, in novelistic fashion. And yet — as with the books of Erik Larson — that’s not true at all. It’s all there in the notes: everything between quotation marks was actually said or written. It’s a remarkable skill. This is a hell of a story, and I use that word appropriately. Those who shipped out from Portsmouth on HMS Wager in 1740 — part of George Anson’s circumnavigation of the globe — struggled through hell.