About

The #1 New York Times bestselling author of Killers of the Flower Moon and The Lost City of Z and award-winning staff writer at The New Yorker—David Grann comes to the Clubhouse to speak about The Wager: A Tale of Shipwreck, Mutiny and Murder on the occasion of the book’s paperback release.

On January 28, 1742, a ramshackle vessel washed up on the coast of Brazil. Inside were thirty emaciated men with an extraordinary tale to tell. They were survivors of His Majesty’s Ship the Wager, a British vessel that had left England in 1740 on a secret mission during an imperial war with Spain. While the Wager had been chasing a Spanish treasure-filled galleon known as “the prize of all the oceans,” it wrecked on a desolate island off the coast of Patagonia. After being marooned for months, the men built the flimsy craft and traversed nearly 3,000 miles of storm-wracked seas. They were greeted as heroes. Six months later, an even more decrepit craft landed on the coast of Chile with three castaways who told a very different story: The thirty sailors who landed in Brazil were not heroes – they were mutineers. As accusations of treachery and murder flew, the Admiralty convened a court martial to determine who was telling the truth, putting the very idea of empire on trial.

NPR host of Wait, Wait…Don’t Tell Me! Peter Sagal joins Grann to discuss the nature of survival, duty, and leadership, and to examine how both people and nations tell—and manipulate—history.

A paperback copy of The Wager is included with your ticket.

Biographies

David Grann is the author of the #1 New York Times bestsellers Killers of the Flower Moon and The Lost City OF Z. Killers of the Flower Moon was a finalist for the National Book Award and won an Edgar Allan Poe Award. He is also the author of The White Darkness and the collection The Devil and Sherlock Holmes. Grann’s investigative reporting has garnered several honors, including a George Polk Award. He lives with his wife and children in New York.

Peter Sagal is the host of the Peabody Award-winning NPR news quiz Wait Wait . . . Don't Tell Me! and the author of The Incomplete Book of Running and The Book of Vice: Naughty Things and How To Do Them. He is a playwright, screenwriter, an amateur athlete, and host of several podcasts and documentaries, including The Chernobyl Podcast from HBO and Constitution USA with Peter Sagal on PBS. Sagal lives in the Chicago area with his wife Mara, sons Elliott and Theodore, and two dogs, DeeDee and Dutchie, who like to see their names in print.

Event Overview

5:30pm | Reception

6:00pm | Conversation begins

7:00pm | Program Concludes

Attire

Club Smart/Business Casual

Parking

The nearest parking garage to the University Club is the Grant Park North Garage (25 N Michigan Ave).

About the University Club of Chicago

The University Club of Chicago is a private club with a 100+ year history of serving generations of Chicago’s civic, arts, philanthropic, and business leaders. The Club has welcomed luminaries from the world of art, architecture, literature, music, theater, science, sports, and government and recognized icons in Chicago’s cultural history from Ai Weiwei, Speaker Emerita Nancy Pelosi, Tom Hanks, Mary Beard, Misty Copeland, Pete Townsend, Doris Kearns Goodwin, Fareed Zakaria, and other visionaries.

David Grann: The Wager | In Conversation with Peter Sagal