Exciting, well told, and befitting the wild life of a pirate—even if Kidd wasn’t one.
A dashingly narrated life of Captain William Kidd, freeing him of his unwarranted reputation as a notorious pirate.
Kidd was no pirate, historian Zacks (History Laid Bare, not reviewed, etc.) argues in this solidly documented historical thriller, but a New York sea captain with a house, wife, and child on Wall Street, and with a special commission from King William III and other notables to hunt pirates and divvy up the booty with his backers. This was an exceptional charge, since it allowed Kidd to circumvent the Admiralty court. But it was also a secret commission, and his actions won him few friends in the Royal Navy, which frowned on privateers of any stripe, or with the East India Company, which suffered as a result of his work. Recreating in great detail Kidd’s months searching for bounty, yet doing so with a verve that keeps the story light on its feet, Zacks also sets straight the life of the pirates—violent and short, certainly, but far more democratic than that experienced by those on land. It was Kidd’s ill luck to take a glorious treasure from a Moslem vessel, throwing the East India Company’s best-laid plans in India into a precarious position. The captain was left out on a limb, and his backers quickly disavowed any knowledge of his commission, for treason was the charge here. Zacks reveals the double-cross through a paper trail of logbooks, diaries, letters, and transcripts of the trial that sent Kidd to the gallows while his erstwhile pirate nemesis, Robert Culliford, walked free from Newgate Prison. In addition, Zacks paints a real-life picture of the pirates’ port of choice in the 1690s—New York City—its customs, the fluid politics that pertained to maritime affairs, and even what it was like to attend a hanging.
Exciting, well told, and befitting the wild life of a pirate—even if Kidd wasn’t one.Pub Date: June 1, 2001
ISBN: 0-7868-6533-4
Page Count: 432
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2002
This exuberant account of life in post-Communist Czechoslovakia by one of its colorful prodigal sons reads much like a grand extension of its breathless title, but it fails to sustain the same punch and humor. Czech-born Novak (The Willys Dream Kit, 1985, etc.) has been in the United States for so long and is so Americanized that he now writes in English rather than Czech. Yet Czechoslovakia's Velvet Revolution has evoked in him a healthy dose of reflection on contemporary American life and a deep-rooted curiosity about post- Communist Eastern Europe. Novak's return to Prague with wife and two children in tow reveals familiar faces and ways as well as an unstable society in the process of reinvention. With the exception of an incident involving lice (confirming that one only truly fathoms another culture through children), many of the situations and individuals Novak discusses are already familiar to us from the mass media. These ritual encounters include buying a used car from a provincial wheeler-dealer; chasing down a gypsy pickpocket on the Charles Bridge; and battling inebriated crowds at a soccer match. The author is foremost a satirist and humorist. His tactic here is to relate his family's adventures as if he were telling their tales over several rounds of Pilsner beer in a rowdy Prague beer hall. The result is a combination of brief, uninsightful reflections and lengthier, more successful accounts of incidents and personalities, especially of the writer Bohumil Hrabal and the photographer Anton°in Kratochvil. Among the more irritating and telling quirks of Novak's style is his practice of stringing together capitalized words in a form of shorthand, describing Vaclav Havel, for instance, as ``a Coyote-in-the-Henhouse Playful President.'' Some unusual insights, but too often simply more of the familiar stories picked up by journalists, related in an excessively talkative style.
Pub Date: May 12, 1995
ISBN: 1-883642-09-4
Page Count: 216
Publisher: Steerforth
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 1995
BOOK REVIEW
A solid, balanced portrait of the radical fringe of New England abolitionists who bankrolled John Brown's ill-fated but pivotal raid at Harpers Ferry. Was Brown the righteous ``angel of light'' eulogized by Thoreau or a cold-blooded killer and petty thief? A shepherd leading slaves to freedom or an opportunistic wolf who fooled the age's leading intellectual lights? Renehan (John Burroughs: An American Naturalist, 1992) doesn't tackle the paradoxes of Brown's character head-on. Instead, he chronicles the maneuvers and schemes of the northern intelligentsia who supported ``Old Brown'' as he cobbled together a ragtag army to fight his holy war on slavery. Renehan remains steadfastly objective, eschewing interpretive speculation in deference to primary sources—most significantly, the large body of personal correspondence that survived despite the conspirators frequent injunctions to one another to ``burn this.'' Suspicion and self-preservation were characteristic of the six principals, who ran the gamut from impoverished ministers to millionaires. Renehan's evidence suggests the abolitionists, grown weary of finding a political solution to the slavery problem, backed Brown despite believing his plan suicidal, then abandoned him when their fears proved true. After the raid at Harpers Ferry, the six vacillated between outlandish rescue schemes (one called for kidnapping the governor of Virginia and ransoming him for the condemned Brown) and fleeing to Canada. Summoned to testify before Congress after Brown's execution, those who did show perjured themselves, denying involvement. While Renehan sheds little new light on the enigmatic Brown, he provides an important historical corrective regarding the events that helped precipitate the Civil War: Northern abolitionists, not the renegade Southern states, were the first true rebels in the battle over slavery. (23 b&w photos, not seen)
Pub Date: May 1, 1995
ISBN: 0-517-59028-X
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 1995
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