Rough Waters and Other Stories is a collection of original stories addressing different ethical questions and dilemmas. An introduction makes connections among the stories, puts them in personal and political perspective, and anchors them in a tragic understanding of life and ethics. The characters in Rough Waters and Other Stories – some based on real historical people - must make or finesse ethical choices, some of them straight-forward, others tragic in nature. Tragic choices involve trade-offs between seemingly irreconcilable but important goals. Alternatively, they entail committing ourselves to decisions or policies whose outcomes are uncertain. We are desperate to avoid tragic choices and prone to convince ourselves – often in the face of good evidence – that we can satisfy all of our desires or needs instead of making difficult choices between or among them. We also tend to convince ourselves that our decisions or policies well succeed in proportion to the degree that we feel compelled to commit to them. A standard trope of Greek tragedy – think here of Oedipus – is that our choices sometimes lead directly to the outcomes we are trying desperately to avoid.
Rough Water tells the incredible stories of men and women battling the elements, and sometimes each other, to stay alive. Sailors confront storms, rogue waves, icebergs, sharks, starvation and their own fear and suffering. In these stories, at least, the sea often helps those who help themselves.
"I hate to lose. And what I really hate about it is that it takes exactly the same effort to lose as it does to win. So, if you're going to make that effort, why not make the effort to win?" --Tom Whidden, three-time America's Cup winner, president of North Marine Group America's Cup winner Peter Isler shows how the skills and strategies used in professional sailing apply equally well to competition, teamwork, and success in the world of business. Some of the most prominent and successful CEOs and executives in America are sailors--and with good reason. In both business and sailing, only the best-led, best-trained, most highly motivated teams win. In At the Helm, two-time America's Cup winner Peter Isler translates the secrets of success in the fast-paced world of grand-prix sailboat racing into a series of specific lessons that managers and businesspeople can apply to their day-to-day jobs. In the world of business and sailing, building a successful "team" takes years of planning, training, practice, and cooperation, with an absolute commitment to winning. Liberally sprinkled with entertaining, insightful, and cautionary stories from the worlds of sailing and business, At the Helm shows why it is essential to be able to change course quickly; how to "stack the deck" in your favor; how to plan for the unexpected. In addition, Peter includes a section on assessing your strengths and weaknesses, and offers suggestions on how to become a better "sailor." The first book to apply the strategies required for putting together a world-class sailing crew to the world of business, At the Helm is the perfect mix of business and pleasure. Liberally sprinkled withentertaining, insightful, and cautionary stories from the world of sailing and business, AT THE HELM shows why it is essential to be able to change course quickly, how to "stack the deck" in your favor, and how to plan for the unexpected. In addition, Isler includes a section on assessing strengths and weaknesses, and offers suggestions on how to become a better "sailor." The first book to apply the strategies required in putting together a world-class sailing crew to the world of business, AT THE HELM is the perfect mix of business and pleasure. -->
National bestselling author Sharon Shinn introduces a rich new fantasy world, one in which people believe that five essential elements rule all things and guide their lives.
This is not your mother’s memoir. In The Chronology of Water, Lidia Yuknavitch, a lifelong swimmer and Olympic hopeful escapes her raging father and alcoholic and suicidal mother when she accepts a swimming scholarship which drug and alcohol addiction eventually cause her to lose. What follows is promiscuous sex with both men and women, some of them famous, and some of it S&M, and Lidia discovers the power of her sexuality to help her forget her pain. The forgetting doesn’t last, though, and it is her hard-earned career as a writer and a teacher, and the love of her husband and son, that ultimately create the life she needs to survive.
The Sea Cloak is a collection of 11 stories by the author, journalist, and women’s rights campaigner, Nayrouz Qarmout. Drawing from her own experiences growing up in a Syrian refugee camp, as well as her current life in Gaza, these stories stitch together a patchwork of different perspectives into what it means to be a woman in Palestine today. Whether following the daily struggles of orphaned children fighting to survive in the rubble of recent bombardments, or mapping the complex, cultural tensions between different generations of refugees in wider Gazan society, these stories offer rare insights into one of the most talked about, but least understood cities in the Middle East. Taken together, the collection affords us a local perspective on a global story, and it does so thanks to a cast of (predominantly female) characters whose vantage point is rooted, firmly, in that most cherished of things, the home.
Two grieving brothers learn the importance of family and the power of white water. When their parents are killed in a car accident, Scott and his brother Gregg are sent to live with an uncle they never knew they had. Hurt, angry, and confused, they leave a comfortable life in the California suburbs and head to the remote Colorado Rockies, where their uncle runs a white-water rafting company. Scott, forced to confront his loss and face an uncertain future, determines to make the best of a difficult situation. But his brother Gregg, burying his grief deep inside, begins to drift away from the only family he has left. As they become acquainted with the power and unpredictability of the river and begin to learn the skills of maneuvering the rapids, the brothers discover that it is harder than they ever dreamed to master the art of survival—both on and off the water. Award-winning author S. L. Rottman has crafted an absorbing young adult novel that powerfully depicts the complexity of grieving and the value of family.
Join debutante-gone-detective Molly DeWitt as she finds herself in hot water in these two timeless mysteries from #1 New York Times bestselling author Sherryl Woods. Hot Money The Save the Environment gala has Molly DeWitt and dashing detective Michael O’Hara swimming with society sharks when Molly hooks the most endangered species of all: the late chairwoman of the affair. Tessa was no saint, and the rich shed crocodile tears for the departed philanthropist. Now the question Molly needs to answer isn’t who wanted Tessa dead, but who killed her—and why. Hot Schemes When Michael O’Hara’s favorite uncle’s boat floats into the Miami docks wired to explode, Molly DeWitt is horrified when Michael leaps aboard and speeds away from the gawking crowd. Singed by his narrow escape, Michael is burning to discover the truth. Is Uncle Miguel dead? Molly and Michael search for clues, but find themselves point-blank in the crosshairs of terror...
On February 28, 2009, Nick Schuyler went on a deep-sea fishing trip with three friends: NFL players Marquis Cooper and Corey Smith, and Will Bleakley, former University of South Florida football player and Nick's best friend. What was supposed to be a day of fun and relaxation aboard Cooper's twenty-one-foot vessel turned nightmarish in the Gulf of Mexico, seventy miles west of Tampa, Florida, when a tragic mistake caused their boat to capsize. With no food or water, no emergency beacon to alert authorities, the four athletes clung to the overturned hull through the night—battling hypothermia, hallucinations, hunger, dehydration, and huge pounding waves, as they prayed, spoke of their loved ones, and shared what they would have done differently with their lives. In the end, only one would reach dry land alive. Much more than a riveting true account of survival, Not Without Hope is Nick Schuyler's inspiring story of courage, resolve, and friendship.
Outpirating the pirates with one of the most interesting men alive: Max Hardberger recounts his adventures repossessing ships and sneaking them out of lawless, third-world countries, often under threat of death or imprisonment. His journeys lead him from corrupt ports in the Caribbean to the ice-bound docks of Vladivostok. His adventures in rescuing ships pit him against a rogue's gallery of antagonists, including Haitian rebels, modern-day Caribbean pirates and Russian mobsters. • Capt. Max Hardberger uses every trick, tool and tactic at his disposal to right wrongs and out-pirate pirates in this action-packed expose of the seedy underworld of international shipping. As a professional ship extractor, he risks death and imprisonment in dangerous third-world ports to steal ships from modern buccaneers and corrupt governments and deliver them back to their rightful owners. In the course of his adventures, he's had to outwit resourceful crime families, subdue armed soldiers, and turn the tables on clever con artists. He's escaped imprisonment in Venezuela and avoided death at the hands of the Russian mafia. Because Max shuns the use of force, the ingenious methods he must use to accomplish his missions are the stuff of legend he's employed a witch doctor in Haiti, tricked armed guards off a ship in Honduras, and rented a brothel in Mexico, all to thwart the designs of ship-thieves. Seized! is an intense, fast-paced window on the underbelly of ocean shipping, where all power comes from the barrel of a gun, and the only law is the law of survival. -- "Max Hardberger, maritime repo man extraordinaire ... Using a combination of ingenuity, stealth and good old-fashioned derring-do, he has made his name retaking vessels which have been hijacked or which, through local corruption, are impounded by authorities hungry for bribes." • -- Sunday Express • "With most people, the longer you spend talking to them, the more normal they appear. With Hardberger, the reverse applies. Just when you think you've heard it all, he comes up with something wilder ... Over the years, he's distracted crews with prostitutes and witch doctors, bribed officials to look the other way, conned Russian mobsters and hidden from naval radar by riding out thunderstorms at sea; he's even taken a 10,000-tonne freighter out of Haiti while the 2004 revolution was going on around him." • -- Guardian • "Required reading, fascinating. Maritime Repo Man Hardberger does it tough; his life is flown by the seat of his pants, or shipped, much like his profession ... This book delivers." • -- Paul Carter, bestselling author of Don't Tell Mum I Work On The Rigs and This Is Not A Drill • "In this heart-stopping account of his work recovering stolen (or otherwise illegally-seized) ships from 'hellhole' ports, commercial captain Hardberger proves himself tough as a tank and articulate as a poet ... [He] has a seafarer's gift for atmospheric storytelling, layering details to create a sense of place, history, and foreboding ... Hardberger's escapades make undeniably fun reading." • -- Publishers Weekly • "One of the strengths of Hardberger's book is his prose, which is lucid, entertaining and dramatic." • -- Daniel Sekulich, author of Terror on the Seas: True Tales of Modern Day Pirates
