BORN IN THE BREEZES

Young readers intrigued by the brief encounter with Slocum, the first man to sail solo around the world, in Robert J. Blake’s Spray (1996) will welcome this expanded look at the life of one of the Age of Sail’s last great seamen. A full captain by the age of 25, Slocum sailed many ships, raised his family on some of them, undertook his epic voyage on a 36-foot sloop he rebuilt himself, and ultimately disappeared at sea. Drawing from Slocum’s memoirs, still in print after more than a century, Lasky (Starring Lucille, see below, etc.) focuses on storms, shipwrecks, mutinies, exotic ports of call—and also his doughty wife Virginia, whose facility with a revolver came in handy more than once. The salt breeze seems to flow from Krudop’s (My Great-Grandmother’s Gourd, 2000, etc.) impressionistic, thickly brushed scenes of tall ships and ramrod straight figures in 19th-century dress. Lasky, a veteran sailor herself, sends children on a voyage they won’t soon forget, with a man for whom land never meant “home.” (Biography. 10-13)