The Wager

Storyline: 5 Stars

I can see why David Grann was named the 2023 Barnes and Noble author of the year. He was able to write a historical non-fiction book that was written like a story. There are a lot of non-fiction books that can be bogged down with details that read more like a school history book, but David Grann wrote The Wager like a story. I have never read a book that gave great historical context and was written like a story.

I would recommend this book to nonfiction lovers, but I also think this is a good introductory book for someone that has not read much nonfiction. It is not super long, and it is readable and easy to understand. I think anyone could enjoy the book! Plus, it’s very interesting because the story actually happened.

Parental Guidance: 95% Recommend

I would recommend this book 95% of the time for parental guidance. There was really nothing inappropriate in the book, but there were cases of violence and disease. Those parts were not super graphic because the author is writing history, but some of it was disturbing.

As long as someone is able to read at this level, there really is not hindrance to reading this book because there is not mature content.

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Spoilers Ahead

This was so good! I don’t think that I have read a historical nonfiction book so quickly. It read like a story, and I was actually curious about what happened to the characters and how everything would be resolved.

It is wild to me that so many men died and that Britian started the journey to begin with knowing that so many would die. It’s also crazy how little these people knew about hygiene and health. The things that we don’t even think twice about today were unheard of back then. I found all of that intriguing. The value of life was so much less than the pride of the country, and if they put as much effort into medical research as they did into trying to make themselves look better than the next colonizer, they probably would have been better off.

I appreciated how many sources David Grann had. I could really tell that he did a lot of research which made me confident that I was reading the most historically accurate book that could be written about the tale.