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suzemews's review against another edition
1.0
I didn't bother finishing this one. It was way too tedious for me.
bookish_ann's review against another edition
informative
slow-paced
3.0
I have a mild case of Gay Pirate Brain Rot (aka being a fan of Our Flag Means Death) so I thought I’d ease the pain of waiting for HBO to renew it by going to the source. Until I read some commentary I 100% did not believe that Stede Bonnet, The Gentleman Pirate was an actual real person. I mean, that name! Come on. But nope, he was not invented for the show, though the campy name influenced the fictional characterization.
I’d love to say that this book gives us some details of the wild adventures of Stede and Blackbeard and their contemporaries, but this book is DRY. It’s more like a forensic accounting of the ships and goods that were taken, and where, and when. It’s a lot of lists.
It started out promising though, because the author has a very very dry wit as well and some of the early book is straight up hilarious (in a disdainful Dowager Countess way). Alas, over the course of this very, very, very long book the humor either ran out or I became too exhausted by the archaic language to notice it.
It became a slog not only because of the language, but because guess what? Pirates were not fun! And the people they were robbing were horrible too! Raping and slaving…. Not exactly a light fun read. But the book makes it very clear that the pirates and the merchants/sailors are the same. Pirates are just self-employed… the rest work for the East India Company or the Crown.
There was one bright section to the book -the stories of Mary Reade and Anne Bonny are short but very entertaining. And the author apologies for that! Says he knows it reads like a novel but he swears it’s true. LOL. So that gives you an idea of how deliberately dull most of this is. It can be a painful slog but it was weirdly interesting.
I’d love to say that this book gives us some details of the wild adventures of Stede and Blackbeard and their contemporaries, but this book is DRY. It’s more like a forensic accounting of the ships and goods that were taken, and where, and when. It’s a lot of lists.
It started out promising though, because the author has a very very dry wit as well and some of the early book is straight up hilarious (in a disdainful Dowager Countess way). Alas, over the course of this very, very, very long book the humor either ran out or I became too exhausted by the archaic language to notice it.
It became a slog not only because of the language, but because guess what? Pirates were not fun! And the people they were robbing were horrible too! Raping and slaving…. Not exactly a light fun read. But the book makes it very clear that the pirates and the merchants/sailors are the same. Pirates are just self-employed… the rest work for the East India Company or the Crown.
There was one bright section to the book -the stories of Mary Reade and Anne Bonny are short but very entertaining. And the author apologies for that! Says he knows it reads like a novel but he swears it’s true. LOL. So that gives you an idea of how deliberately dull most of this is. It can be a painful slog but it was weirdly interesting.
Content Warnings
Minor: Rape and Slavery
jonraymond21's review against another edition
4.0
If you really care about the primary source of almost everything we know of Pirates, this is your book. If you're only vaguely interested in Pirates, you might want to revisit this after another read.