Boston Book Festival 2019

Join us for a stimulating mix of poetry, history, mystery, anthropology, and environmentalism, all relating to the sea. The session will begin with a reading by poet and naturalist Elizabeth Bradfield from her new collection, Toward Antarctica, informed by her work as a guide on ships in Antarctica. Christina Thompson will speak about Sea People, called a “grand, symphonic, beautifully written book,” by the Boston Globe. In it, she investigates what came to be known as the Problem of Polynesian Origins: the mystery of how a pre-literate people managed to navigate and inhabit the remotest islands in the Pacific Ocean. Bathsheba Demuth’s Floating Coast, hailed as brilliant by multiple reviewers, offers a uniquely told history of a unique place, Beringia, the Arctic land and waters that stretch from Russia to Canada. Demuth combines ecology, anthropology, and reportage to forge a fascinating environmental history of a largely overlooked landscape. David Armitage, professor of history at Harvard and editor, most recently, of Civil Wars: A History of Ideas, will moderate.