about David Grann
The buzz around the Wager book is intense, but before you bet your reading time on it, you need to know the true caliber of the mind behind the narrative. I’ve personally followed the career of David Elliot Grann, and his track record as an American journalist proves he’s not one to produce simple hype. Born on March 10, 1967, Grann has built a reputation as a “workhorse reporter” a quality that inspires devotion in readers that can border on the obsessive. He is, of course, a staff writer for The New Yorker, but his extensive work has written for high-profile publications like The New York Times Magazine, The Atlantic, The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal, and The Weekly Standard. His initial book, The Lost City of Z: A Tale of Deadly Obsession in the Amazon, published by Doubleday in February 2009, was an immediate success; after its first week of publication, it debuted on The New York Times bestseller list at No. 4 and later reached No. 1. This success wasn’t a fluke; Grann’s articles have been collected in several anthologies, including What We Saw: The Events of September 11, 2001, The Best American Crime Writing of 2004 and 2005, and The Best American Sports Writing of 2003 and 2006. In 2009, he received both the George Polk Award and Sigma Delta Chi Award for his New Yorker piece “Trial By Fire,” demonstrating the gravitas and investigative depth he brings to every project, a depth that elevates the story of Wager far beyond a typical thriller.
PLOT of the wager
From distance, the plot of The Wager looks like one of those old-fashioned stories I grew up Reading on long nights at sea, but David Grann has shaped it in a new way. Before I ever opened this new book, I already knew him as an author whose earlier work especially Killers of the Flower Moon and The Lost City of Z carried the kind of weight that made me expect another masterpiece. And in this story, he tells a harsh, classic sea yarn without overthrowing the depth that real history demands.
I still remember a morning Sun, 30, Apr, 2023, around 07.00, BST when a fellow reader hit Share on an early review and told me, “You should see how David Grann builds this one.” He charts the course of men who thought they were following a familiar script of adventure, but instead found themselves trapped in what felt like poetry that had turned against them. Along the way, he also nods to other tellers of modern adventure tales, including the sharp tone of Matthew Teague and even the dry humor of Alexandra Petri’s US history review, reminding me that if you’re going to lie, lie big but only if you’re writing funny fiction. This, however, is not fiction.
The Wager sets out as some hands on a mission that might have become a relic a ship heavy with ambition, like something 18th century, worn, almost worm-eaten, yet wearing a thin new coat paint. But the real power in this plot is how Grann, one of America’s most meticulous narrative nonfiction writers, turns the story into something more unsettling than a straightforward disaster.
He begins by describing how the mid-18th century world sent out a cast of sailors and their officers during the bizarre War of Jenkins’ Ear, a conflict named for an allegation that a Spanish sailor cut off a British sailor’s ear. It sounds ridiculous now, but the British and Spanish empires were clawing for as much of the New World as they could snatched from each other.
When His Majesty’s Ship The Wager set sail across Atlantic in 1740 on a covert mission to intercept a Spanish treasure ship off the Chilean coast, I felt that familiar thrill the kind I used to get reading about storms or mutinies. The sailors faced horrors as they rounded Cape Horn, where the strongest currents world smashed even the toughest hulls. I have crossed rough waters myself (though nothing like this), and the memory helped me understand how easily a ship can break the courage of even veterans.
This is also where scurvy set, and typhus followed. At early point story, Grann begins to drift away from romantic sea-faring literature and, instead, focuses on the raw physical breakdown: the bloodshot eyes, the teeth fell out, the hair, the bones rattled, the cartilage weakening. When I read this part, I had to pause. I once spent a short stretch reporting aboard a fishing vessel; even minor sickness spreads fast in tight quarters. What Grann records here feels painfully true.
He then begins weaving the plot with references to older sea poetry and narrative forms, dropping hints that don’t fully make sense until the later chapters. The great albatross appears, linking the story to the curse in The Rime of the Ancient Mariner, and suddenly the “hellish thing” Coleridge wrote about becomes a shadow over the crew. Herman Melville, too, floats into the frame another reminder that Cape Horn does not forgive.
When The Wager crashes not onto Robinson Crusoe Island but a remote scrap off Patagonia, the plot truly tightens. The conflict between Capt David Cheap and the ship’s gunner John Bulkeley turns into the kind of leadership struggle that feels timeless. I’ve seen versions of this dynamic in real expeditions one leader by rank, one by instinct both convinced survival depends on following his plan.
Eventually, as Grann gives away early, some survivors return England only to be court-martialed and ordered to present their stories. Was it survival or something darker? A quiet, festering mutiny? That question alone kept me turning pages long past midnight.
What stayed with me most is how the plot becomes a story about stories the ones we tell ourselves, the ones empires tell to justify power, the ones nations polish to hide the cost. Grann’s references suddenly sharpen into focus, showing how narratives shape what we believe. It made me think of my own years reading literature, how often old colonial tales painted adventure as glory while ignoring the human wreckage underneath.
In that sense, this plot, though rooted in the sea, becomes something new: a tight, clear-eyed reminder that truth is rarely tidy, even when written in the classic style of a sea yarn.
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