Of all the stories of ships lost in what has come to be called the Graveyard of the Pacific, that of the steamship Valencia is among the saddest. In January 1906, the Valencia set out from San Francisco, bound for Seattle with 108 passengers and some sixty-five crew members aboard. Owing to bad weather and the captain's mistakes, the ship struck a reef eleven miles off Cape Beale on the southwest coast of Vancouver Island. Rocks gashed open the ship's hull, and a series of further missteps soon compounded the tragedy a hundredfold. Only thirty-seven people survived, largely because of a lack of lifesaving infrastructure in the rugged area where the Valencia ran aground.

The wreck of the Valencia was an especially tragic one. To begin with, most on board perished, including every woman and child, many of whom had been lashed to the rigging high above the deck in an attempt to save them from the crashing waves. Additionally, the wreck itself was almost certainly avoidable, due almost entirely to navigational errors the captain made. Finally, rescue efforts--such as they were--were hampered by not just the sea and weather but by the mistakes (and some say the cowardice) of the would-be rescuers.

This book pieces together the story of the Valencia and her tragic end, weaving together not just the threads of the ill-fated voyage itself but also relevant contextual history, including the development of radio technologies and lifesaving equipment and services that simply came too late to help the doomed voyagers.

Sailing by Starlight is the story of the adventure of a lifetime--in fact, of many lifetimes. In the early 1980s, retired geography professor Marvin Creamer set out to do what hadn't been done for a thousand years--if indeed it had ever been done at all: Marv and his crew boarded a 35' sailboat named Globe Star and set out into the frigid Atlantic, planning to sail around the world without the use of any instruments. There was no sextant aboard. No compass. No chart-plotter. No GPS. No radar. Not even a stopwatch. Creamer wanted to prove to the world that it was possible for ancient mariners to have crossed the largest seas, perhaps even sailed around the world, using only their brains, their experience, their sense, and their courage. In attempting to prove his point, Creamer would push his boat and his crew to the limit--and occasionally beyond.

Travel with Creamer as Globe Star sails around the perilous Horn, across the dangerous and tumultuous Tasman Sea, and into an active war zone. Sail around the world with a man who was taken prisoner by an idea, a man obsessed with proving a point, and who would let neither 40-foot waves nor fractious crewmembers deter him.

Leveling the Playing Field explores the technologies that trickle down to the rest of us, those that were once the domain of the wealthy and powerful--and which therefore tended to make them even more wealthy and powerful. Now, though, these technologies--from books to computers to 3D printing and beyond--have become part of a common toolkit, one accessible to almost anyone, or at least to many more than had heretofore had access. This is what happens with most technologies: They begin in the hands of the few, and they end up in the hands of the many. Along the way, they sometimes transform the world.