100 books like Immigrant Patriot

This is a beautiful story, simple yet profound. It’s about young, innocent, and a wee bit naïve Jamie, led to adventure by troubled but brave Mara.

The adventure takes us to St. Kilda’s, the remotest inhabited Scottish island. The island, the sea, and the quest to explore are used as metaphors for mystery and the pull of the unknown.

There are probably more fantasies and myths about the Hebridean island of St Kilda than any other location in existence – though there are a few other Scottish islands that compete in this field!

Roger’s book is excellent because it is grounded in fact and meticulous research, yet it is also a celebration of this unique landscape to be found at the far western edge of the Outer Hebrides. 

A Place Called Freedom attracted me instantly because of its multiple settings (Scotland, London, and Virginia) and the theme of ordinary people struggling against adversity. 

The novel provides vivid insight into governmental repression of religion and the denial of basic human rights. As a historian, I enjoy reading historical fiction. Follett is a master of his craft, blending human interest stories with accurate history. Through his characters, he shows how people lived and reacted to historical events.

A Place Called Freedom transports the reader into the years prior to the American Revolution, and his vivid geographical descriptions made me feel like “I was there!”  

This book is out of print but available in a second-hand market and worth finding. My copy once belonged to my Grandma.  

I’ve learned preparation for a holiday or journey is key to success. This book tells the background which led to Ann and her husband acquiring Reliance, a 2-masted sailing ship. Making it sea-worthy was far from straightforward. Their journey to cross the Atlantic began in extremely difficult circumstances. The book recounts in agonising detail the journey’s progress and ending.   

I felt as I read this book I was with Ann and Frank, through the many ups and downs they experienced. I’m full of admiration for their resilience and determination.

The author, Ann, later became the first woman to single-handedly sail across the Atlantic Ocean in 1952.

The sea figured prominently in early American life.  Westward expansion is a dominant theme in American history, but as historian Daniel Vickers demonstrates, the horizon extended in all directions. For those who lived along the Atlantic coast, it was the East — and the Atlantic Ocean — that beckoned. In Young Men and the Sea, seafaring is a normal part of life. Drawing on the records of thousands of mariners sailing from Salem, Massachusetts, Vickers offers a fascinating social history of early American seafaring.  In what sort of families were sailors raised? When did they go to sea?  What were their chances of death? Whom did they marry, and how did their wives operate households in their absence? This book is destined to become a classic of American social history.

I like a good wine (though Madeira isn’t one of my favorites). I like even more a book that tells me about wine—and about many other things that I had not previously connected to wine. That’s what Oceans of Wine does and does magnificently.

David Hancock is a pioneering scholar who has taught us to understand the Atlantic Ocean “world” as an interconnected space of exchanges that remade all the individuals and societies surrounding it. In this book, he shows how merchants in Britain, Portugal, and British North America transformed Madeira from a rather ordinary wine into a transatlantic bestseller.

Like most of my favorite historians, Hancock has dug up a treasure trove of unexplored sources to write a big story in a wholly new way.

Rachel Carson will forever be known for Silent Spring, her courageous, farsighted warning of our pesticidal poisoning of the world. But it was her three ocean-oriented books preceding Silent Spring that best showcase her artistic melding of meticulous research with her wide-eyed sense of wonder. And none more so than Under The Sea Wind, her first and most intimate work, tracing the seasonal travails of fish and shorebirds—living, heroic creatures we come to know by name—through their inspiring, interlocking circles of life.

The two previous books in this list had given me a little taste of Carpathia’s story, the ship that came to Titanic’s rescue and picked up all the survivors.

And then, after my book was published, a book blogger got in touch to say she’d been inspired by my book to find out more about Carpathia, and had bought this book by Jay Ludowyke which she recommended to me.

I bought it, read it, and realised there was another novel in this, one set mostly on Carpathia after the rescue… and so I wrote it. It’s to be published in November 2023!

Ludowyke’s book tells the whole story of Carpathia, not just that famous night. From how she was named, to how her wreck (she was torpedoed in the First World War) was discovered and identified, this book reads like a novel in itself, and I highly recommend it.

I sometimes think of memoir as a modern genre, but the truth is that people have been writing about their own lives for thousands of years.

This 1789 account begins with Olaudah Equiano’s day-to-day life growing up in the kingdom of Benin, Africa, and then describes his crossing the Atlantic Ocean via the Middle Passage and subsequent enslavement.

When I first read this book in college, it was the beginning of my realization that the people in history were people with whom I share all the same range of emotions and motivations that comes with being human. This book instilled in me a desire to understand the people of the past.

Threats to our world are not limited to those created by despots, terrorists, and weapons of mass destruction.

Climate change and associated global warming may be the biggest threat as sea levels rise as polar ice melts, threatening coastal environments. Increases in sea temperature fuel ever larger and more powerful storms and weather systems. Donlay captures this threat in Category Five, Hurricane Helena is growing into the greatest storm ever recorded.

Eco-watch races to save the scientists who are studying the storm. This amazing thriller combines climate change with intrigue, suspense with death threats. Can they defuse a storm great than Category Five?