novelist and non-fiction author
Knowledge 1.0 has its foundations hewn into a solid rock of unchangeable truth. It believes that knowledge is fixed and forever.
Knowledge 2.0 is floating on a sea of uncertainty and doubt. It understands that knowledge is personal and can only approximate what’s really going on in the world.
This book is about understanding the limitations of a Knowledge 2.0 world and how best to navigate within them.
It will help you make better decisions about everything from money to work to health.
“The author formulates a kind of popular epistemology that divides the various kinds of knowledge into six categories and then anatomizes the vices and virtues of each of them as sources of belief… His prose is unfailingly clear, and he illustrates his points with references to sailing… The best of his treatment is the appraisal of scientific authority.” — Kirkus Reviews
This extract from Part Two of Knowledge 2.0 - Staying Afloat in the Information Age was published by Sailing World in the US online, and in the print edition.
This extract from Part Three of Knowledge 2.0 - Staying Afloat in the Information Age was published by Sailing World in the US online, and in the print edition.
This extract from Part One of Knowledge 2.0 - Staying Afloat in the Information Age was published by Sailing World in the US online, and in the print edition.
This extract from Part Six of Knowledge 2.0 - Staying Afloat in the Information Age was published by Sailing World in the US online, and in the print edition.
This review appeared in Y&Y Online on the 6th February 2024 - Publication Day!
This review appeared on the Sail-World website on 6th February 2024.
This extract from Part 6 appeared in the print edition of Yachting World in the UK in March 2024.
This review of Knowledge 2.0 - Staying Afloat in the Information Age appeared online and in the June 2024 issue of Practical Boat Owner magazine in the UK.
Four narrative non-fiction books include the most recent, Great Moments in Olympic Sailing History, along with the award-winning Spanish Castle to White Night and Risk to Gain. And making up the four is photographer Rick Tomlinson's biography Shooting H2O.
This is the story of the winning team in the 1997/98 Whitbread Race. A unique insight into Team EF's two boats during their journey around the world. Stomach-churning storms, frustrating calms, broken gear and remarkable details of life onboard are all here - as well as shattered hopes and stunning victories. Combined with the exceptional photography of Rick Tomlinson, this is probably the most vivid pictorial and written record of the world's greatest ocean race ever produced. Independent Sports Book of the Week.
Imagine sunsets across calm oceans, cocktails at cosy anchorages, landfalls in amazing new places.... and then imagine something else.
Imagine taking part in one of the planet’s last great adventures. Imagine the story of an incredible race, ripping and roaring through the seven seas. Imagine a tale of endurance, deprivation, fear and courage, a story of winners and losers, those who made it and those who did not. Imagine ‘Spanish Castle to White Night – the Race Around the World’.
This coffee table book reflects the entire history of Olympic sailing, with spectacular photographs celebrating heroes such as Paul Elvstrom and Ben Ainslie, fabulous locations, legendary classes - and the never-ending struggle of an Olympic sailor to make his mark.
Just one historical novel so far, The Fulcrum Files, set in and around an America's Cup campaign back in 1936...
The young, charismatic Ben Clayton was one of Britain’s brightest boxing prospects, until the day he slammed a left hook into a fragile chin. Sickened by the consequences he turned away from the ring, and found solace in the arms of the beautiful Lucy Kirk.
On the 7th March 1936, after almost two decades of peace in Europe, Hitler ordered the German Army back into the Rhineland. It was a direct challenge to Britain and France. Still unnerved by the slaughter of the Great War, the politicians wavered. The French Army stayed in its barracks, while the aristocratic British elite watched from their country retreats.
History was balanced on a knife edge, and MI5's Fleming White knew that if the German challenge was ignored, Hitler's grip on power would harden like setting steel. The result would be a bigger, bloodier war for which Britain was not ready. It was an outcome that White would do anything to avoid.
The ruthless spymaster pushed his pawns around the board and soon just one man could make the difference between war and peace, victory or defeat. And that man was Ben Clayton. Thrown into the maelstrom of plot and counter-plot, into a world of mysteries, murder, spies and traitors, Ben must battle not just to survive, but to protect all that he loved and held most dear - Lucy.
Janac is the psychotic modern scourge of South Asia. His first appearance was in the suspense thriller The Defector - it has topped the Kindle thriller charts in the US, UK, Germany and Italy.
The Wrecking Crew is the sequel, and like The Defector it's appeared on charts and gathered great reviews at Amazon, B&N and the iBookStore - both are available at all the major eBook retailers.
The latest installment is The Sniper, and it will be the first of several short stories from Janac's time in Vietnam as a US Marine Corps sniper, and then with US Special Forces and the CIA.
'This is a remarkable thriller – chillingly violent, full of tension and with a very original ending,' said Publishing News about The Defector.
What will you do, when it's you or them?
This is the dilemma at the heart of The Defector - can Martin Cormac turn his back on his ruthless past as a dealer, a major city player, and do the right thing? Not when he's looking for answers in a succession of sleazy dives...
One night, Cormac gets caught trying to chat up the bar owner's girlfriend and soon needs rescuing. Unfortunately, his white knight is anything but - Janac's a big-time drug baron with a psychotic urge to test people to the limit, and if possible... over it.
And soon Cormac is running from more than his past, he's running from the most dangerous game he will ever play.
The Defector was a #1 Thriller on Amazon.co.uk and Amazon.de.
‘An excellent drug-smuggling thriller.’
The Bookseller
‘This is a remarkable thriller – chillingly violent, full of tension and with a very original ending.’
Publishing News
Janac's back... and there will be games - so what will you do when it's them... or the woman you love?
Drug baron Janac has unleashed a reign of terror in the South China Sea to fund his battle for control of the Australian narcotics trade. When he attacks an old cargo ship on an evil night off the Indonesian coast, it seems he has also found the perfect victims to exploit with his psychotic games.
An empty clearing in the Vietnamese jungle in 1969. An explosive, complex and compromised war rages to the north and south, to the east and the west. Two men come to the clearing with a simple task in mind – to kill a man. A man who wants to visit his girl.
A simple task made dangerous and ultimately deadly by a startling intervention. Soon, US Marine Corps sniper, Paul Robert Janac has to look deep inside to survive a pulse-pounding jungle manhunt that will leave him with a life-or-death choice.
So what will he do, when...
Burn with Sam Blackett - Powder Burn is the first of a series of thrillers featuring Sam, a Vermont backcountry girl and a wannabe investigative journalist. The follow up is set in China and Detroit, and it's called Chinese Burn.
'Chisnell is a favorite of mine and Powder Burn delivers his usual well-researched, fascinating, and fast-paced thriller novel,' said Huffington Post blogger, Nina Sankovitch.
If Dragon Tattoo’s Mikael Blomkvist and the Hunger Games’ Katniss Everdeen could have a love-child, she’d probably be a lot like Sam Blackett...
Sam had given up her Manhattan job, and her cute apartment in Brooklyn. She’d abandoned her astonished boyfriend to the charms of ESPN, and flown off into a new dawn to chase her dream of becoming an investigative journalist.
Three months later, alone in a soulless internet café, she’s facing some cold, hard facts; she’s unpublished, unhappy and broke. And right then, the gorgeous Pete Halland blows into her life – headed for the mythical Powder Burn mountain to write history and blast into legend.
If she throws in her lot with Pete and reports the story for National Geographic magazine it could rescue her ambitions, but he’s holding back some crucial information – the question for Sam is... what?
Soon, Sam is up to her neck in snow and the weather is the least of her problems; lost in a secretive Himalayan kingdom with – what could be – a magic sword and a simmering and potentially bloody revolution.
But the father she lost to the war in Iraq was a marine, and he taught her a few tricks in the Vermont backcountry that might just get her out alive – and with a story to tell that could make the front page of the New York Times.
Sam Blackett has moved on from her adventures in the Himalayas, and moved on from her relationship with Pete. Fortunately, things are going a little better with her journalism, and she's in Shanghai working on a commission for the Boston Globe.
If only she hadn't treated herself to dinner at the five star Peninsula Hotel she might even have got it finished and published - but she did, and so Roger Ravert died in her arms. Now Sam was on the run from the Detroit police, the FBI, the CIA and China's security service. And she had no idea why.
Mark Chisnell can talk to your business or club on the topics in Knowledge 2. 0 - please contact for details.
The years of professional sailing - and launching books onto an unsuspecting world - meant some familiarity with being interviewed. And that helped when it came to switching to the other side of the microphone, which was good, because I was a late-comer to broadcasting...
I started working on the live, in-port race commentary for the Volvo Ocean Race 2008-09. Then in 2010 and 2011 I worked on Red Handed TV's coverage of the World Match Racing Tour, doing live commentary, and scripting and producing highlights shows. In 2011, I anchored the coverage of the Royal Television Society's Best Live Event award winner - Red Handed's coverage of The Monsoon Cup.
It would be nice to claim a journalism career that followed a neat upward trajectory - student rag magazine, local, then regional newspapers, a breakthrough into the national press and finally a by-line in National Geographic, Time, or some other luminary of the global media.
Unfortunately, it's been rather more haphazard than that, hitting the keyboard whenever the opportunity or interest occurred. But that's still led to some fun stories, like this one for Esquire about the 2007 America's Cup.
