A masterful biographer now offers a thrilling, definitive portrait of one of history’s most legendary icons of adventure.In 1860, sixteen-year-old Joshua Slocum escaped a hardscrabble childhood in Nova Scotia by signing on as an ordinary seaman to a merchant ship bound for Dublin. Despite having only a third-grade education, Slocum rose through the nautical ranks at a mercurial pace; just a decade later he was commander of his own ship. His subsequent journeys took him nearly everywhere: Liverpool, China, Japan, Cape Horn, the Dutch East Indies, Manila, Hong Kong, Saigon, Singapore, San Francisco, and Australia—where he met and married his first wife, Virginia, who would sail along with him for the rest of her life, bearing and raising their children at sea. He commanded eight vessels and owned four, enduring hurricanes, shipwrecks, pirate attacks, cholera, smallpox, a mutiny, and the death of his wife and three of his children. Yet his ultimate adventure and crowning glory was still to come.In 1895 Slocum set sail from Gloucester, Massachusetts—by himself—in the Spray, a small sloop of thirty-seven feet. More than three years and forty-six thousand miles later, he became the first man to circumnavigate the globe solo, a feat that wouldn’t be replicated until 1925. His account of that voyage, Sailing Alone Around the World, soon made him internationally famous. He met President Theodore Roosevelt on several occasions and became a presence on the lecture circuit, selling his sea-saga books whenever and wherever he could. But scandal soon followed, and a decade later, with his finances failing, he set off alone once more—and was never seen again.Geoffrey Wolff captures this singular life and its flamboyant times—from the Golden Age of Sail to a shockingly different new century—in vivid, fascinating detail.From the Hardcover edition.

Duke Wolff was a flawless specimen of the American clubman -- a product of Yale and the OSS, a one-time fighter pilot turned aviation engineer. Duke Wolff was a failure who flunked out of a series of undistinguished schools, was passed up for military service, and supported himself with desperately improvised scams, exploiting employers, wives, and, finally, his own son.In The Duke of Deception, Geoffrey Wolff unravels the enigma of this Gatsbyesque figure, a bad man who somehow was also a very good father, an inveterate liar who falsified everything but love.

With these interwoven autobiographical essays, Geoffrey Wolff, author of the acclaimed The Duke of Deception, recounts the moral (and immoral) education of a writer, friend, husband, and father, as he offers his spirited, elegant, and deeply felt observations on an extraordinary life: from wildly dysfunctional childhood Christmases to a concupiscent career teaching literature in Istanbul; from a victory over the chaos of drink to a life-affirming surrender to the majesty of the Matterhorn; and from a foundering friendship to the transcending love of family.He shares with us, then, the wisdom of an alert man learning through the unsettling collisions of time, place, and local custom, and through the force of hardship and hazard, to bring his many disparate selves together -- with astonishing high-stakes candor and dazzling literary agility.

Attorney Adam Dwyer has six months to live. Carla Dwyer has to try and relax. Lieutenant Tom Cocoran has twenty years on the force. Baby and Skippy have a couple of hours to kill. All five of these people will never be the same after a series of violent events, hilarious as they are tragic, upset the equilibrium of life in a small, strange city. Between Boston and New York City lies Providence, Rhode Island. Long considered one of the most corrupt cities in the country, it was often difficult to discern who was more corrupt, the mafia bosses or the suits at city hall. But as the story begins it was definitely a gangland figure (known as “The Moron”) whose slashed, bullet-ridden body Lieutenant Cocoran fished from the Providence River. Providence is a fast-paced black comedy of parallel lives in the small, East Coast port city. Adam Dwyer is a criminal lawyer dying of leukemia. He and his wife Clara receive another blow when their home is robbed by two young thugs, Skippy and Baby. Tom Corcoran, the police officer assigned to the case, becomes involved with Skippy’s waitress girlfriend, Lisa. Long out of print, this New York Times bestselling novel is a raucous gallery of grotesques, a litany of sex, violence, crime, and corruption cast against a precisely drawn portrait of Providence, from the streets of Federal Hill (home of the city's mafiosi) to the fashionable upper East Side (rife with homes ripe for robbing). This Nonpareil edition includes a new afterword by acclaimed television and film writer Ian Maxtone-Graham.

A masterful biographer now offers a thrilling, definitive portrait of one of history’s most legendary icons of adventure.In 1860, sixteen-year-old Joshua Slocum escaped a hardscrabble childhood in Nova Scotia by signing on as an ordinary seaman to a merchant ship bound for Dublin. Despite having only a third-grade education, Slocum rose through the nautical ranks at a mercurial pace; just a decade later he was commander of his own ship. His subsequent journeys took him nearly everywhere: Liverpool, China, Japan, Cape Horn, the Dutch East Indies, Manila, Hong Kong, Saigon, Singapore, San Francisco, and Australia—where he met and married his first wife, Virginia, who would sail along with him for the rest of her life, bearing and raising their children at sea. He commanded eight vessels and owned four, enduring hurricanes, shipwrecks, pirate attacks, cholera, smallpox, a mutiny, and the death of his wife and three of his children. Yet his ultimate adventure and crowning glory was still to come.In 1895 Slocum set sail from Gloucester, Massachusetts—by himself—in the Spray, a small sloop of thirty-seven feet. More than three years and forty-six thousand miles later, he became the first man to circumnavigate the globe solo, a feat that wouldn’t be replicated until 1925. His account of that voyage, Sailing Alone Around the World, soon made him internationally famous. He met President Theodore Roosevelt on several occasions and became a presence on the lecture circuit, selling his sea-saga books whenever and wherever he could. But scandal soon followed, and a decade later, with his finances failing, he set off alone once more—and was never seen again.Geoffrey Wolff captures this singular life and its flamboyant times—from the Golden Age of Sail to a shockingly different new century—in vivid, fascinating detail.From the Hardcover edition.

Duke Wolff was a flawless specimen of the American clubman -- a product of Yale and the OSS, a one-time fighter pilot turned aviation engineer. Duke Wolff was a failure who flunked out of a series of undistinguished schools, was passed up for military service, and supported himself with desperately improvised scams, exploiting employers, wives, and, finally, his own son.In The Duke of Deception, Geoffrey Wolff unravels the enigma of this Gatsbyesque figure, a bad man who somehow was also a very good father, an inveterate liar who falsified everything but love.

With these interwoven autobiographical essays, Geoffrey Wolff, author of the acclaimed The Duke of Deception, recounts the moral (and immoral) education of a writer, friend, husband, and father, as he offers his spirited, elegant, and deeply felt observations on an extraordinary life: from wildly dysfunctional childhood Christmases to a concupiscent career teaching literature in Istanbul; from a victory over the chaos of drink to a life-affirming surrender to the majesty of the Matterhorn; and from a foundering friendship to the transcending love of family.He shares with us, then, the wisdom of an alert man learning through the unsettling collisions of time, place, and local custom, and through the force of hardship and hazard, to bring his many disparate selves together -- with astonishing high-stakes candor and dazzling literary agility.

Attorney Adam Dwyer has six months to live. Carla Dwyer has to try and relax. Lieutenant Tom Cocoran has twenty years on the force. Baby and Skippy have a couple of hours to kill. All five of these people will never be the same after a series of violent events, hilarious as they are tragic, upset the equilibrium of life in a small, strange city. Between Boston and New York City lies Providence, Rhode Island. Long considered one of the most corrupt cities in the country, it was often difficult to discern who was more corrupt, the mafia bosses or the suits at city hall. But as the story begins it was definitely a gangland figure (known as “The Moron”) whose slashed, bullet-ridden body Lieutenant Cocoran fished from the Providence River. Providence is a fast-paced black comedy of parallel lives in the small, East Coast port city. Adam Dwyer is a criminal lawyer dying of leukemia. He and his wife Clara receive another blow when their home is robbed by two young thugs, Skippy and Baby. Tom Corcoran, the police officer assigned to the case, becomes involved with Skippy’s waitress girlfriend, Lisa. Long out of print, this New York Times bestselling novel is a raucous gallery of grotesques, a litany of sex, violence, crime, and corruption cast against a precisely drawn portrait of Providence, from the streets of Federal Hill (home of the city's mafiosi) to the fashionable upper East Side (rife with homes ripe for robbing). This Nonpareil edition includes a new afterword by acclaimed television and film writer Ian Maxtone-Graham.