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Jim Gilbert

Jim Gilbert

About

Author Jim Gilbert recently stood shoulder-to-shoulder with some of the richest, most powerful people in the world as the founding editor-in-chief and later owner of ShowBoats International, the bible of the superyacht industry.

Jim was instrumental in founding the nonprofit International SeaKeepers Society, an organization of more than 100 ultra-wealthy yacht owners concerned with the health of the sea who donated a minimum of $75,000 to advance the cause of marine conservation. He founded the annual SeaKeepers Award, which was annually presented with the Prince of Monaco at his magazine's annual Bal de le Mer gala. Ocean-conscious luminaries as Walter Cronkite, Ted Danson, Dr. Sylvia Earle, Mikhail Gorbachev, James Cameron and Jean-Michel Cousteau were recipients. 

In recognition of his instrumental role in the development of the superyacht industry, in 2006 Jim received the prestigious Leadership Award from the International Superyacht Society.

In The Admiral, Jim combines his passion for boats and his concern about the future of the seas in a way he believes might challenge those with whom he socialized.

“I wouldn't be surprised some will consider me a turncoat,” he says, "for describing a not-too-distant-future in which yachts are no longer the ultimate residences for the super-rich. In The Admiral, yachts are merely decaying homes for a lucky few who have escaped an environmental apocalypse caused by selfish and narcissistic behavior.”

The Admiral is an attempt to educate people by telling a compelling, swashbuckling--and yet scientifically credible yarn--that gives his readers a glimpse of the future of our own making.

A Shadow in Yucatan

A Shadow in Yucatan

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Description

<p>A mythical jewel of a story… A true story told on a beach in Yucatan, A Shadow tells Stephanie's story but it was also the story of the golden time. Its nostalgia sings like cicadas in the heat.</p><p>An American ‘Under Milkwood’, this distilled novel of the Sixties evokes the sounds, music and optimism on the free-wheelin streets and parks of Coconut Grove. You can hear Bob Dylan still strumming acoustic; smoke a joint with Fred Neil; and Everybody’s Talkin is carried on the wind.</p><p>Stephanie, a young hairdresser living in lodgings finds herself pregnant. Refused help from her hard Catholic mother in New York, unable to abort her baby, she accepts the kindness of Miriam, her Jewish landlady, whose own barren life spills into compassionate assistance for the daughter she never had.</p><p>The poignancy of its ending, its generosity and acceptance, echoes the bitter disappointment of those of us who hoped for so much more, but who remember its joy, and its promise, as though untarnished by time.</p>

Story Behind The Book

The Admiral chronicles three generations in the life of Akkadia, a reclusive mid-ocean community of aging yachts the Admiral created to establish an oasis of civilization in the wake social collapse on land from the combined effects of sea level rise and climate change. In a series of swashbuckling adventures, Aqual, the Admiral's fierce and charismatic granddaughter and the novel's heroine, sees more dramatic changes facing her community. Fighting an armada of pirates as well as the enmity of many of her own countrymen by rescuing a boat full of strangers, Aqual follows in The Admiral's footsteps by courageously leading her people forward towards a new period of prosperity.

Media Links

Reviews

<p><span style="font-size:14px;"><span class="color_2">The Admiral is an adventure novel, with urgent moral consequences, about a perilous and costly future. Jim Gilbert writes about boats and the water so well that a reader sometimes seems to be staring at the same harbors and horizons as his characters. </span></span></p> <p class="font_7" style="line-height:1.3em;font-size:14px;"><span style="font-style:italic;"><span style="font-size:14px;"><span class="color_2">Alec Wilkinson -- staff writer at The New Yorker and the author of The Ice Balloon</span></span></span></p> <p class="font_8" style="font-size:14px;"><span class="color_2">Jim Gilbert writes about the sea and sailing in a way that provokes awe and admiration. His novel, The Admiral, is propelled by an unforgettable warrior woman, who leads a marooned people in their struggle to survive in a future determined by the implacable consequences of global warming. </span></p> <p class="font_8" style="font-size:14px;"><span style="font-style:italic;"><span class="color_2">Paul Brodeur—former staff writer at The New Yorker and author of The Stunt Man </span></span></p>