Ex-chief justice to sign new book

Jeffrey Amestoy will sign copies and discuss his new book, “Slavish Shore: The Odyssey of Richard Henry Dana Jr.,” on Saturday, Aug. 1, from 2:30 to 4 p.m. at Bridgeside Books, 29 Stowe St., Waterbury.

Amestoy is former chief justice of the Vermont Supreme Court and is a fellow at the Center for Public Leadership at Harvard’s Kennedy School.

“Slavish Short,” the first full-length biography of Dana in more than half a century, reintroduces readers to one of America’s most zealous defenders of freedom and human dignity.

In 1834, the Harvard dropout sailed to California as a common seaman. His account of the voyage, “Two Years Before the Mast,” quickly became an American classic.

The drama of Dana’s life arises from unresolved tension between the Boston Brahmin he was expected to be on shore and the man he had become at sea. Dana’s sense of justice made him a lawyer who championed sailors and slaves, and was at the center of some of the most consequential cases in American history: defending fugitive slave Anthony Burns, justifying President Lincoln’s war powers before the Supreme Court and prosecuting Confederate president Jefferson Davis for treason.

Information: bridgesidebooks.com, 244-1441.