paper 0-7656-0257-1 Lane (History/Coll. of William & Mary) offers an overview of the history behind the romances of piracy on the “Spanish Main.” Lane’s thesis regarding piracy in American waters (his focus here) is that by and large piracy in the Caribbean (and, significantly, in the Pacific as well) had its roots in the response of the rest of Europe to Spanish and Portuguese imperial designs on the New World. The first Caribbean pirates were, in fact, French Huguenots, English “privateers” (the latter ostensibly acting on behalf of Queen Elizabeth), and Dutch sea-rovers, staunch Protestants all, who were particularly ill-disposed toward the Catholicism of the Iberian thrones. The best known of these—the Englishmen John Hawkins and Francis Drake—have earned inflated reputations as scourges of the Spaniards, but the Dutch may have inflicted even more damage on Spanish interests in the New World, as Lane points out in detail. Yet our highly colored picture of the pirates and their crews derived more from the final and briefest cycle of piracy in the New World; in the aftermath of the War of the Spanish Succession, just prior to the beginning of the 18th century, a new breed of buccaneer emerged, anarchic, owing allegiance to no flag but his (and, in isolated cases, her) own, and robbing from Spanish, English, French, or anyone else’s shipping without discrimination. The most valuable contribution of this book is to put these most famous marauders into a larger historical context and to point out how brief their reign of seagoing terror really was. How disappointing, then, to discover that our fabled swashbucklers were little more than waterborne bandits who practiced a particularly ruthless form of political expediency. Lane recounts his tale in an amiable if somewhat dry voice, and the resulting book is more interesting than stirring. A useful corrective to the mythology of the pirate, but one wishes it were a little more hearty. (illustrations, maps, not seen)
Pub Date: Aug. 1, 1998
ISBN: 0-7656-0256-3
Page Count: 216
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 1998
The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...
Elie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children.
He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions.
Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2006
ISBN: 0374500010
Page Count: 120
Publisher: Hill & Wang
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006
Buffs of the Old West will enjoy Clavin’s careful research and vivid writing.
Rootin’-tootin’ history of the dry-gulchers, horn-swogglers, and outright killers who populated the Wild West’s wildest city in the late 19th century.
The stories of Wyatt Earp and company, the shootout at the O.K. Corral, and Geronimo and the Apache Wars are all well known. Clavin, who has written books on Dodge City and Wild Bill Hickok, delivers a solid narrative that usefully links significant events—making allies of white enemies, for instance, in facing down the Apache threat, rustling from Mexico, and other ethnically charged circumstances. The author is a touch revisionist, in the modern fashion, in noting that the Earps and Clantons weren’t as bloodthirsty as popular culture has made them out to be. For example, Wyatt and Bat Masterson “took the ‘peace’ in peace officer literally and knew that the way to tame the notorious town was not to outkill the bad guys but to intimidate them, sometimes with the help of a gun barrel to the skull.” Indeed, while some of the Clantons and some of the Earps died violently, most—Wyatt, Bat, Doc Holliday—died of cancer and other ailments, if only a few of old age. Clavin complicates the story by reminding readers that the Earps weren’t really the law in Tombstone and sometimes fell on the other side of the line and that the ordinary citizens of Tombstone and other famed Western venues valued order and peace and weren’t particularly keen on gunfighters and their mischief. Still, updating the old notion that the Earp myth is the American Iliad, the author is at his best when he delineates those fraught spasms of violence. “It is never a good sign for law-abiding citizens,” he writes at one high point, “to see Johnny Ringo rush into town, both him and his horse all in a lather.” Indeed not, even if Ringo wound up killing himself and law-abiding Tombstone faded into obscurity when the silver played out.
Buffs of the Old West will enjoy Clavin’s careful research and vivid writing.Pub Date: April 21, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-250-21458-4
Page Count: 400
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Jan. 19, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2020
© Copyright 2024 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
bookshelf
