A well-told adventure.
Meticulous chronicle of perhaps the most audacious pirate raid in history.
On the Caribbean side of the Audiencia of Panamá, the city of Portobello welcomed Spanish ships carrying manufactured goods critical to the West Indian empire’s maintenance. On the Pacific side of the narrow isthmus lay the city of Panamá, where ships laden with silver from Peru off-loaded their treasure onto mule trains headed to Portobello for galleons returning to Spain. By 1666, it had been almost 70 years since English privateer Francis Drake had seriously threatened the area’s security. In the meantime, her treasury drained by incessant war and the cost of servicing her far-flung colonies, Spain’s power waned, her vigilance relaxed and her defense of the Caribbean grew thin and rusty. From his base on Jamaica, Privateer Henry Morgan noticed. Taking full advantage of Spanish decay and the vast distances and slow communications that allowed him to ignore whatever peace agreement Europe had concluded, Morgan (making sly use of commissions issued by Jamaica’s governor, Thomas Modyford, that lent legal cover to his operations) brought Spain to her knees. Earle (Economic History/Univ. of London; The Pirate Wars, 2005, etc.) focuses on the five-year period featuring a series of pirate attacks and Spanish counterthrusts that culminated in the audacious 1671 raid on Portobello and the looting of Panamá, which cemented Morgan’s reputation as history’s greatest pirate commander, whose effectiveness was exceeded only by his brutality. Relying mostly on letters, reports and legal documents, the author has pieced together a fascinating tale that’s especially strong in recounting the Spaniards’ mostly hapless response to Morgan’s depredations and in delineating how piracy thrived within the interstices of law and diplomacy. Earle also explains why, once launched on their dubious missions, irregular forces of men who thought nothing of rape, torture or any despicable tactic to gain their objective, nonetheless strictly adhered to self-made codes of conduct and elaborate conventions that governed the division of spoils.
A well-told adventure.Pub Date: Feb. 6, 2007
ISBN: 0-312-36142-4
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Dunne/St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2007
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
A zesty, energetic history, not only of a building, but of more than a century of American culture.
A revealing biography of the fabled Manhattan hotel, in which generations of artists and writers found a haven.
Turn-of-the century New York did not lack either hotels or apartment buildings, writes Tippins (February House: The Story of W. H. Auden, Carson McCullers, Jane and Paul Bowles, Benjamin Britten, and Gypsy Rose Lee, Under One Roof In Wartime America, 2005). But the Chelsea Hotel, from its very inception, was different. Architect Philip Hubert intended the elegantly designed Chelsea Association Building to reflect the utopian ideals of Charles Fourier, offering every amenity conducive to cooperative living: public spaces and gardens, a dining room, artists’ studios, and 80 apartments suitable for an economically diverse population of single workers, young couples, small families and wealthy residents who otherwise might choose to live in a private brownstone. Hubert especially wanted to attract creative types and made sure the building’s walls were extra thick so that each apartment was quiet enough for concentration. William Dean Howells, Edgar Lee Masters and artist John Sloan were early residents. Their friends (Mark Twain, for one) greeted one another in eight-foot-wide hallways intended for conversations. In its early years, the Chelsea quickly became legendary. By the 1930s, though, financial straits resulted in a “down-at-heel, bohemian atmosphere.” Later, with hard-drinking residents like Dylan Thomas and Brendan Behan, the ambience could be raucous. Arthur Miller scorned his free-wheeling, drug-taking, boozy neighbors, admitting, though, that the “great advantage” to living there “was that no one gave a damn what anyone else chose to do sexually.” No one passed judgment on creativity, either. But the art was not what made the Chelsea famous; its residents did. Allen Ginsberg, Bob Dylan, Andy Warhol, Janis Joplin, Leonard Cohen, Robert Mapplethorpe, Phil Ochs and Sid Vicious are only a few of the figures populating this entertaining book.
A zesty, energetic history, not only of a building, but of more than a century of American culture.Pub Date: Dec. 3, 2013
ISBN: 978-0-618-72634-9
Page Count: 448
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
Review Posted Online: Sept. 18, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2013
BOOK REVIEW
Occasionally unfocused, but redeems itself by putting a vivid, human face on an unimaginable nightmare.
A ground-level illustration of how the plague ravaged Europe.
For his tenth book, science writer Kelly (Three on the Edge, 1999, etc.) delivers a cultural history of the Black Death based on accounts left by those who witnessed the greatest natural disaster in human history. Spawned somewhere on the steppes of Central Asia, the plague arrived in Europe in 1347, when a Genoese ship carried it to Sicily from a trading post on the Black Sea. Over the next four years, at a time when, as the author notes, “nothing moved faster than the fastest horse,” the disease spread through the entire continent. Eventually, it claimed 25 million lives, one third of the European population. A thermonuclear war would be an equivalent disaster by today's standards, Kelly avers. Much of the narrative depends on the reminiscences of monks, doctors, and other literate people who buried corpses or cared for the sick. As a result, the author has plenty of anecdotes. Common scenes include dogs and children running naked, dirty, and wild through the streets of an empty village, their masters and parents dead; Jews burnt at the stake, scapegoats in a paranoid Christian world; and physicians at the University of Paris consulting the stars to divine cures. These tales give the author opportunities to show Europeans—filthy, malnourished, living in densely packed cities—as easy targets for rats and their plague-bearing fleas. They also allow him to ramble. Kelly has a tendency to lose the trail of the disease in favor of tangents about this or that king, pope, or battle. He returns to his topic only when he shifts to a different country or city in a new chapter, giving the book a haphazard feel. Remarkably, the story ends on a hopeful note. After so many perished, Europe was forced to develop new forms of technology to make up for the labor shortage, laying the groundwork for the modern era.
Occasionally unfocused, but redeems itself by putting a vivid, human face on an unimaginable nightmare.Pub Date: Feb. 1, 2005
ISBN: 0-06-000692-7
Page Count: 384
Publisher: HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2005
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