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graywacke 's review for:
Mayflower: A Story of Courage, Community, and War
by Nathaniel Philbrick
My first audio-book. I found this quite different then reading. Instead of my mental state of reading, it was kind of like having NPR on the background with interesting but not critical information. Surely I would have been much more engaged had I read this...but I probably would not have read this and I did get a lot out of it. It helped that the narrator seemed particularly good (George Guidall)
As for the contents, the Mayflower itself is a very small part of this story which stars with English Puritan separatists leaving England for Holland, and ends with King Philip's War - which steals the book in way. The Mayflower and the Pilgrims and their Indian exploits (with treaties and also much killing and complicated politics) become simply the set-up for a fascinating account of the war which slowly escalates into higher and higher body counts, eventually taking large percentages of both English and native lives. It was quite riveting to listen to the war waver back and forth between English annihilation of Indian warriors to the Indians taking control and even seeing themselves on the brink of winning...now what would that have done to history? But it was not to be. Lack of food, and supplies and terrible leadership by King Philip do them in, and the English end up wiping out large swaths of the Indian population throughout Massachusetts, Connecticut & Rhode Island.
As for the contents, the Mayflower itself is a very small part of this story which stars with English Puritan separatists leaving England for Holland, and ends with King Philip's War - which steals the book in way. The Mayflower and the Pilgrims and their Indian exploits (with treaties and also much killing and complicated politics) become simply the set-up for a fascinating account of the war which slowly escalates into higher and higher body counts, eventually taking large percentages of both English and native lives. It was quite riveting to listen to the war waver back and forth between English annihilation of Indian warriors to the Indians taking control and even seeing themselves on the brink of winning...now what would that have done to history? But it was not to be. Lack of food, and supplies and terrible leadership by King Philip do them in, and the English end up wiping out large swaths of the Indian population throughout Massachusetts, Connecticut & Rhode Island.