A History of the World in 12 Shipwrecks by David Gibbins

I had never thought a lot about shipwrecks until my youngest son became a Classics major, and I was plunged into that world by virtue of being his scribe and his reader. He is an auditory learner who is more than a little deaf and because of a previous medical condition, doesn't write very well either--I went to a total of three in person lectures and many more online lectures, and learned an awful lot about what can be learned from a shipwreck. In short, this book is a bit gimmicky in it's title, and while it is not just the story of those ships, the people who sailed on them, and the cargo and treasure they carried, but also the story of the spread of people, religion, and ideas around the world; it contains stories of colonialism, migration, power, obstacles to overcome, and the real options that seafaring gave humans before we had flight. The author is an underwater archeologist who has been at the dive sites for these wrecks (and more, I would presume) so he does bring a first hand account of the wrecks themselves, as well as the history surrounding them, but it does not encompass the totality of world history. The book is reasonably well written, but did not knock it out of the park for me.