Acclaimed Bath author will be at the PPL on Wednesday

"There were so many opportunites to go to sea -- fishing, whaling, coastal carriage, long-haul trade to India, China, the West Indies, and Europe, not to mention naval service -- that a Westport boy would have had to search for a reason to reject the call."

Bath author Geoffrey Wolff, a former Washington Post books editor, Princeton and UC Irvine professor, and American Academy of Arts and Letters award winner, will be in town on Wednesday to read from his new book, The Hard Way Around: The Passages of Joshua Slocum (Knopf). It's the story of a Nova Scotian seafarer, Joshua Slocum, who was the first man to circumnavigate the globe alone (he set sail from Gloucester, Massachusetts in 1895), and whose prolific accounts portray magnificent adventures and changing times. It's a brown-bag lunch from 12-1 at the Portland Public Library.