Books about Shipwrecked from Amazon.com

In this beautifully crafted memoir, a young half-Muslim, half-Christian woman travels to India to connect with a tiny Jewish community and unlock her family’s secret history

Sadia Shepard grew up in a joyful, chaotic home just outside of Boston, Massachusetts, where cultures intertwined, her father a white Protestant from Colorado and her mother a Muslim from Pakistan. Her childhood was spent in a house full of stories and storytellers, where the customs and religions of both of her parents were celebrated and cherished with equal enthusiasm. But Sadia’s cultural legacy grew more complex when she discovered that there was one story she had never been told. Her beloved maternal grandmother was not a Muslim like the rest of her Pakistani family, but in fact had begun her life as Rachel Jacobs, a descendant of the Bene Israel, a tiny Jewish community whose members believe that they are one of the lost tribes of Israel, shipwrecked in India two thousand years ago. This new knowledge complicated Sadia's cultural inheritance even further, intimately linking her to the faiths of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam and to the customs of India, the United States, and Pakistan.

At her grandmother's deathbed, Sadia makes a promise to begin the process of filling in the missing pieces of her family's fractured mosaic. With the help of a Fulbright Scholarship and armed with a suitcase of camera equipment, she arrives in Bombay, where she finds herself struggling to document a community in transition. Her search to connect with the Bene Israel community and understand its unique traditions brings her into contact with a cast of remarkable characters, tests her sense of self, and forces her to examine what it means to lose and seek one’s place, one’s homelands, and one’s history. In the process, she unearths long-lost family secrets, confronts her fears of failure, and finds love in places that surprise her. Sadia beautifully weaves together the story of her grandparents’ secret marriage and the haunting legacy of Partition with an evocative account of a little-known Jewish community and a young woman’s search for self. The Girl from Foreign is her poetic and touching attempt to reconcile with her family's past and help determine her future. When offered the choice, will she be able to choose among the religious and cultural identities that have shaped her? It is an unforgettable story of family secrets, buried identities, lost histories, forbidden love, and, above all, eye-opening self- discovery..
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Junie B. Jones Is a Graduation Girl
All the children in Room Nine are excited when they get their bright white graduation gowns. Then an accident happens! Can Junie B. find a way to fix things?

Junie B., First Grader (at last!)
When Junie B. tries to read words on the chalkboard, she can’t seem to see what everyone else is seeing! Is it possible she might actually end up wearing . . . glasses?

Junie B. First Grader: Boss of Lunch
Junie B. is getting to help in the school cafeteria. Maybe one of these days she’ll be the boss of this whole entire operation!

Junie B. First Grader: Toothless Wonder
Only Junie B. is not that thrilled about this. Because what if she looks like toothless Uncle Lou? And what’s all this tooth fairy business? So many questions, so little time.

Junie B., First Grader: Cheater Pants
Junie B. has all the answers when it comes to cheating. It’s just wrong! But what about copying someone else’s homework? Could she be a cheater pants and not even know it?

Junie B., First Grader: One Man Band
It’s time for the first-grade kickball tournament! Only Junie B. has hurt her big piggy toe and she can’t play on the team. Maybe she could be in Sheldon’s halftime show!

Junie B., First Grader: Shipwrecked
Room One is putting on a play about explorers looking for the New World! Plus–Junie B. thinks she might be the star of the whole entire production!

Junie B., First Grader: Boo . . . and I MEAN it!
It’s Halloween! Only Junie B. is afraid to go trick-or-treating. But then she gets an idea for a costume to out-scare even the creepiest competition..
Price: $19.48 [Notify me when price goes down.]

Ship Ahoy!

Room One is putting on a play. And guess what? It’s about explorers looking for the New World! And there’s ships and sea captains and everything! Plus here’s the bestest news of all—Junie B. Jones thinks she might be the star of the whole entire production! Only, sailing the ocean blue is not as easy as it looks, apparently ’Cause problems keep on happening. Like the actors keep catching the flu. And bossy May keeps trying to take over the show.

Can this play be saved? Will the ships ever get to land? Or is Room One in for a disaster at sea that they will never forget?


From the Hardcover edition..
Price: $0.78 [Notify me when price goes down.]

Auckland Island is a godforsaken place in the middle of the Southern Ocean, 285 miles south of New Zealand With year-round freezing rain and howling winds, it is one of the most forbidding places in the world. To be shipwrecked there means almost certain death.

In 1864 Captain Thomas Musgrave and his crew of four aboard the schooner Grafton wreck on the southern end of the island. Utterly alone in a dense coastal forest, plagued by stinging blowflies and relentless rain, Captain Musgrave—rather than succumb to this dismal fate—inspires his men to take action. With barely more than their bare hands, they build a cabin and, remarkably, a forge, where they manufacture their tools. Under Musgrave's leadership, they band together and remain civilized through even the darkest and most terrifying days.

Incredibly, at the same time on the opposite end of the island—twenty miles of impassable cliffs and chasms away—the Invercauld wrecks during a horrible storm. Nineteen men stagger ashore. Unlike Captain Musgrave, the captain of the Invercauld falls apart given the same dismal circumstances. His men fight and split up; some die of starvation, others turn to cannibalism. Only three survive. Musgrave and all of his men not only endure for nearly two years, they also plan their own astonishing escape, setting off on one of the most courageous sea voyages in history.

Using the survivors' journals and historical records, award-winning maritime historian Joan Druett brings this extraordinary untold story to life, a story about leadership and the fine line between order and chaos..
Price: $11.58 [Notify me when price goes down.]

Nine weeks after losing her husband, Charlotte escapes to a wooden motor yacht in New Hampshire, where her shipmates are an aging blue-haired widow, an emotional seventeen-year-old, and the ugliest dog in literature A genuine bond develops among the three women, as their distinct personalities and paths cross and converge against the backdrop of emotional secrets, abuse, and the wages of old age.

Off the boat, Charlotte, an archaeologist, joins a local excavation to uncover an ancient graveyard. Here she can indulge her passion for reconstructing the past, even as she tries to bury her own recent history. She comes to realize, however, that the currents of time are as fluid and persistent as the water that drifts beneath her comforting new home..
Price: $1.72 [Notify me when price goes down.]

the classic story of the Robinson family shipwrecked on an island where they quickly learn that the island is filled with giant fig trees, wild animals and hidden caves..
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Translated by Randolf Hogan. In 1955, Garcia Marquez was working for El Espectador, a newspaper in Bogota, when in February of that year eight crew members of the Caldas, a Colombian destroyer, were washed overboard and disappeared. Ten days later one of them turned up, barely alive, on a deserted beach in northern Colombia. This book, which originally appeared as a series of newspaper articles, is Garcia Marquez's account of that sailor's ordeal..
Price: $4.69 [Notify me when price goes down.]