And then I would go back to reading about the Wager. Discussions of so-called alternative facts and fake news. I would come home and I’d flip on cable news or read the newspaper and there would be all these discussions about wars over the truth and disinformation and misinformation. They all begin to wage a war on the truth. And so, in hoping to save their lives, they release these various accounts trying to depict themselves as the heroes of the story. And if they don’t tell a convincing tale, they could be hanged. They’d waged this war against every element and now, suddenly, they are summoned to face a court martial. Why resuscitate and revive and spend years excavating something from the 18th century? But as I started to dive into archives and pull journals, I realized that as interesting as what had happened on the island was, what happened after several of the survivors made it back to England was even more incredible. Yeah, but I was looking for a deeper resonance. It’s incredible that anyone survived given the calamities and deprivations the crew faced. Just like in America today there was a battle over history and who gets to tell it and efforts by those in power to erase a sinful past.” Grann says the tragedy of the Wager is a “parable for our turbulent times. There are competing accusations and narratives of mutiny and murder that lead to a court martial, where losing means death. When some of the survivors return to England years later with wildly different accounts of what happened, things get even weirder. There’s mayhem, treachery, and death, imperialism and class struggle, lots of scurvy, and enough harrowing scenes to haunt any reader. It’s the story of a doomed British naval vessel that sets out in 1740 to wage war against the Spanish and ends up wrecked on an island off the shores of Patagonia. Grann’s masterful new book The Wager: A Tale of Shipwreck, Mutiny and Murder is at once an adventure on the high seas, a horror story, and a courtroom drama - a little bit Rashomon meets Lord of the Flies.
He followed up in 2017 with The Killers of the Flower Moon, a blistering investigation into a series of unsolved murders of members of the Osage tribe in Oklahoma during the early 1900s (the film adaptation, directed by Martin Scorsese and starring Leonardo DiCaprio, premieres at Cannes this month). His bestseller The Lost City of Z transported readers into the Amazon on a quest for a mythical civilization (and became a 2016 movie starring Charlie Hunnam). Writer David Grann is one of the premier nonfiction storytellers of our time.
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