Dolin’s The Wreck of the Mentor makes New York Times list of highly anticipated 2026 nonfiction
Book cover image courtesy of Eric Jay Dolin
Eric Jay Dolin is the author of seventeen books, including Leviathan: The History of Whaling in America; A Furious Sky: The Five-Hundred-Year History of America’s Hurricanes; Black Flags, Blue Waters: The Epic History of America’s Most Notorious Pirates; and Rebels at Sea: Privateering in the American Revolution.
Eric’s writing grew out of his early fascination with the natural world and years working in environmental policy. “Throughout my career, one thing remained constant--I enjoyed writing and telling stories,” he shares on his website. “And that's why I started writing books--to share the stories that I find most intriguing.”
His forthcoming book (June 2, 2026), The Wreck of the Mentor: A True Story of Death, Despair, and Deliverance in the Age of Sail has been named on the New York Times’ list The Nonfiction Everyone Will Be Talking About in 2026.
The Wreck of the Mentor is “an astonishing true story―one of the most gripping maritime sagas of the nineteenth century―told by our era’s “expert literary steersman” (Washington Post). The book tells the story of the American whaleship Mentor, wrecked in 1832 on a remote reef in the western Pacific. With supplies dwindling, the eleven surviving crewmen face not only the miseries of shipwreck in unfamiliar territory but also the profound uncertainty of contact with the Indigenous people of the Micronesian archipelago of Palau, who within days approach the deserted men brandishing axes, clubs, and spears. In this gripping saga of cultural collision, tribal wars, and dashed hopes, award–winning historian Eric Jay Dolin vividly reconstructs the Mentor’s doomed voyage, the years of perilous captivity, and the delicate negotiations and fraught naval rescue mission that followed.
Illustrated by more than 100 images and maps, The Wreck of the Mentor is at once a powerful story of survival and a revealing window into the great Age of Sail―a time when maritime ambition collided with local sovereignty, and when the outcome of one voyage rippled across oceans and empires.
Learn more about The Wreck of the Mentor, and Eric’s other books here.
