Bestselling author Irwin Shaw’s lighthearted travelogue follows his family’s vacation sailing from St. Tropez to Venice in the 1960s. As a boy, Irwin Shaw stared out across Brooklyn’s Sheepshead Bay and dreamed of owning a boat and sailing the oceans wide. Decades later, he determined that chartering a yacht was better than having no boat at all. With his wife and son, Shaw then set out to mosey about the Mediterranean, guided by a Scottish captain, his wife and daughter, and a Greek cabin boy. From St. Tropez to Naples, and across the Adriatic to Dubrovnik and up to Venice, it was the trip of a lifetime, its only fault being that, eventually, it would have to end. Written in 1964, this travel memoir is a portrait of a bygone age, when the sun-soaked Mediterranean was still emerging from the shadow of World War II and “vacation” truly meant detaching oneself from the world. Featuring cameos by legendary authors such as Françoise Sagan and James Jones, this endearing memoir is the next best thing to a Mediterranean cruise.
