In 1587, a band of settlers — 115 men, women, and children — founded the first English colony in the New World, on Roanoke Island in what is now North Carolina. Three years later, their governor returned from a resupply mission to England only to find that they’d vanished with barely a trace. What happened to them? The answer is a mystery to this day.
Andrew Lawler (1998-99) reports that he’s “spent the last couple of years at archaeology digs, in archives, and mucking around in the occasional Carolina swamp” to find out. The results are in the June issue of National Geographic and in his new book, “The Secret Token: Myth, Obsession, and the Search for the Lost Colony of Roanoke,” just published by Doubleday.
“What surprised me the most,” Andrew writes, was “how the story of the settlers became an American myth wrapped up in our conflicting ideas about race, immigration, and gender. Who knew a 400-year-old mystery could be so strangely relevant?”
As part of his book tour, Andrew will be at Porter Square Books in Cambridge at 7 p.m. Thursday, June 28. Other stops are listed on his Facebook page. “I would enjoy meeting other Knight alumni!” he writes “And if anyone visits Asheville, N.C., be sure to let me know. I’m happily freelancing here and thinking about the next book.”
Also newly published this month: “Tasting the Past: The Science of Flavor and the Search for the Origins of Wine,” by Kevin Begos (2003-04), from Algonquin Books. The book is the result of a 10-year journey — from the Caucasus Mountains, where wine grapes were first domesticated 8,000 years ago, to Israel, Greece, Italy, and France, and finally to America, where vintners are learning to make distinctive wines from a new generation of local grapes. Kevin unearths a “world of forgotten grapes,” reads the note for his book on Amazon, and brings alive the research of the archaeologists, geneticists, chemists — even a paleobotanist — “who are deciphering wine down to molecules of flavor.”
Undark, the KSJ program’s science magazine, published a “What I Left Out” essay based on “Tasting the Past,” the tale of an octogenarian Israeli historian whose passion for ancient technology led to some startling discoveries about the history of winemaking.
And one more book, this one for children: “Dinosaurios del Fin del Mundo” (“Dinosaurs of the End of the World”), by Federico Kukso (2015-16), from Penguin Random House — a beautifully illustrated exploration of the most recent dinosaur discoveries in Patagonia. You can find it on Amazon, Google Play, and iBooks.
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