Booked by HooksBookEvents: Thursday, May 14, 2009
Book: Rescue Warriors
Author: David Helvarg
Publisher: Thomas Dunne Books, 2009
About the Author – David Helvarg is founder and president of the Blue Frontier Campaign, a Washington, D.C.—based organization working for ocean and coastal conservation.
An award-winning journalist, he has written for The New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, Smithsonian, Popular Science, Sierra, and The Nation, and has produced more than forty documentaries for PBS, the Discovery Channel, and others.
He is also a licensed private investigator, body surfer, and scuba diver. His previous books include The War Against the Greens, Blue Frontier, and 50 Ways to Save the Ocean. He lives in the San Francisco Bay Area.
About the Book – Since its founding more than two hundred years ago, the United States Coast Guard has rescued over a million people. On any given day, “Coasties” respond to 125 distress calls and save over a dozen lives. Yet despite having more than 50,000 active-duty and reserve members on every ocean and on our nation’s coasts, great lakes, and rivers, most of us know very little about this often neglected but crucial branch of the military.
In Rescue Warriors, award-winning journalist David Helvarg brings us into the daily lives of Coasties, filled with a salty maritime mix of altruism and adrenaline, as well as dozens of death-defying rescues at sea and on hurricane-ravaged shores.
Helvarg spent two years with the men and women of the Coast Guard, from the halls of their academy in New London, Connecticut, to the frigid, storm-tossed waters of Alaska’s Bering Sea, to the northern Persian Gulf, where they currently guard Iraqi oil terminals. The result is a masterpiece of adventure reporting—-the definitive book on America’s “forgotten heroes.”