South Street Seaport Museum Presents Book Launch: The Stowaway

The South Street Seaport Museum has added a second date, by popular demand, for the Book Launch: The Stowaway. Tuesday, January 23, 2018 at 213 Water Street, NYC. Tickets are $10 (free for members) and are available at www.seaportmuseum.org/stowaway. Doors open at 6:15pm. Reception and book signing to follow.

Within minutes of announcing the book launch event for Laurie Gwen Shapiro's new book The Stowaway the tickets had sold out! By popular demand we've added a second date! Join the Seaport Museum, along with Simon & Schuster on January 23rd to celebrate the book launch of Laurie Gwen Shapiro's new book, The Stowaway: A Young Man's Extraordinary Adventure to Antarctica, an Indie Next Pick for January 2018 as well as Amazon Best of the Month Biography and Memoir. The evening's conversation will be moderated by William Roka, South Street Seaport Museum Historian.

Tickets go on sale on January 5. Visit www.seaportmuseum.org/membershipfor more information on supporting the South Street Seaport Museum.

The Stowaway is the spectacular, true story of a scrappy teenager from New York's Lower East Side who, like many Americans during the Roaring Twenties, fantasized about joining the most famous and daring venture of the era: Commander Richard Byrd's expedition to Antarctica.

It was 1928: a time of illicit booze, of Gatsby and Babe Ruth, of freewheeling fun. The Great War was over and American optimism was higher than the stock market. What better moment to launch an expedition to Antarctica, the planet's final frontier? Everyone wanted to join the adventure. Rockefellers and Vanderbilts begged to be taken along as mess boys, and newspapers across the globe covered every stage of planning. The night before the expedition's flagship launched, Billy Gawronski-a skinny, first-generation New York City high schooler desperate to escape a dreary future in The Family upholstery business-jumped into the Hudson River and snuck aboard. Could he get away with it?

From the grimy streets of New York's Lower East Side to the rowdy dance halls of sultry Francophone Tahiti, all the way to Antarctica's blinding white and deadly freeze, The Stowaway takes you on the unforgettable voyage of a gutsy young stowaway who became an international celebrity and a mascot for an up-by-your-bootstraps age.

About the Author: Laurie Gwen Shapiro is an award-winning documentary filmmaker and journalist whose writing has appeared in The New Yorker, New York, Slate, Aeon, The Forward, and the Los Angeles Review of Books. The Stowaway is her first full-length work of nonfiction.

ABOUT SOUTH STREET SEAPORT MUSEUM

The South Street Seaport Museum, located in the heart of the historic Seaport district in New York City, preserves and interprets the history of New York as a great port city. Designated by Congress as America's National Maritime Museum, the Museum houses exhibition galleries and education spaces, working nineteenth century print shops, and an active fleet of historic vessels that all work to tell the story of "Where New York Begins."