Hello everyone, I'm Gilbert Cruz and this is the Book Review Podcast. David Gran is a

staff writer at the New Yorker Magazine and the author of two of the centuries more well-regarded

books of narrative nonfiction. The lost city of Z about Percy Fossett, a British explorer

in the early 20th century in his obsession with an Amazonian civilization that he believed

had escaped modern notice, as well as killers of the flower moon, a tragic and often infuriating

real-life mystery about a Native American tribe in Oklahoma which came into great wealth

and found themselves being picked off one by one. That book has been made into a film directed

by Martin Scorsese, starring Leonardo Caprio, their sixth movie together that were premiered

this fall. This month, David is publishing The Wager, a tale of Shipwreck, Mutiny, and Murder.

The book tells a story of a British warship HMS The Wager that Shipwreck's near Patagonia

in 1741, some of the crew miraculously survive and eventually make it back to England with

tales of, as a subtitle says, Mutiny and Murder. It's an incredibly research book that might

make you never again entertain thoughts about the majesty of seafaring life. David, welcome to

the Book Review Podcast. It's great to be here. Thank you. Thank you for that lovely introduction.

So the joy of reading this book is in the nitty-gritty details, but you have to give us an overview

of this story, which begins with something I had never heard of before called No joke, The War of

Jenkins's Ear. Yes, so the War of Jenkins Ear, which is some really absurd name for the war

in which this expedition takes place in, was caused to provoke when a story circulated that a

British seamen ship had been boarded in the Caribbean by Spanish forces, and they had cut off his

ear. His name was Robert Jenkins. The incident had actually taken place many years earlier, and it

had a whiff of the Gulf of Tonkin incident of the Vietnam War, where it was ginned up as a pretext

for imperialists seeking to expand the British Empire into Latin America. But the war became known

...