This fascinating novel about 18th-century privateer Alexander Selkirk, abandoned on a tiny island in the South Pacific, becomes a revelatory meditation on humanity ...

The real life of Alexander Selkirk surpassed Crusoe’s in almost every aspect. But then I may be biased. You see, poor Alex—pirate, lout and hero—was not in fact born with the name Selkirk, but with an ...

Fifty years ago, a man bought an island in the Indian Ocean and began reintroducing the indigenous giant tortoise species. The BBC recently visited the island of a 86-year-old Yorkshire man, Brendon ...

The True and Strange Adventures of the Real Robinson Crusoe By Diana Souhami Harcourt. 246 pp. $24 In the spring of 1719, an astonishingly prolific British journalist named Daniel Defoe published a ...

Q: More than once I have heard that the character Robinson Crusoe was based on the life of a real person. Is this true? B.H., Montrose, Colo. A: It’s true. Daniel Defoe wrote of the adventures of ...

Selkirk's Island: The True and Strange Adventures of the Real Robinson Crusoe by Diana Souhami (Harvest, $13). There really was a real Robinson Crusoe whose life inspired Daniel Defoe's 1719 novel.

We have all seen the dream. Someone on an island. Idyllic. No cares. Perhaps a Corona near by as we skip rocks on the flat sea. I have always wondered why the island is tropical with that proverbial ...