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
A compelling argument that over its history the South changed from a polyglot society into two homogeneous ones divided by race, but that in recent decades the region has been rapidly acquiring a new ethnic diversity. Tindall (History/Univ. of North Carolina; America, 1984) develops this thesis in three short pieces drawn from his 1992 Averitt lectures at Georgia Southern University. In the first, ``Natives and Newcomers,'' Tindall gives an overview of the surprisingly diverse social composition of the South from the time of the first European settlers through modern times. The pervasive presence of African-Americans and Indians, Scotch-Irish settlers, English colonists, Louisiana Cajuns, and German Protestants seeking religious freedom gave the 18th-century South, in Tindall's view, ``the most polyglot population in the English colonies.'' After the Revolution, Indians were expelled from the Southeastern states and far fewer new immigrants settled in the South than in the North. In ``Ethnic Southerners,'' Tindall traces the growth of a distinctive southern ethnicity from the colonial period to the 20th century. The regional identity of southern people, he asserts, grew both out of the ethnic traditions they brought with them and out of perceived contrasts with other regions of the country in lifestyle, custom, and outlook. In ``Southern Ethnics,'' Tindall looks at the modern phenomenon of foreign immigration to the South. He points out that, in recent decades, more people have moved into the region than have moved out: from Southeast Asia, Latin America, and the northern states. Tindall anticipates that the nativism, xenophobia, and political tension that met earlier waves of immigration to the US may occur in the modern South, but that the diverse cultures of the new southern ethnics will ultimately enrich their region. Tindall eruditely shatters stereotypes about the South, drawing a picture of a region that is at once distinctive and much like the rest of the US in its diversity.
Pub Date: Jan. 17, 1995
ISBN: 0-8203-1655-5
Page Count: 79
Publisher: Univ. of Georgia
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 1994
Though uncritical in his admiration for British arms, Allen provides a rousing and informative yarn that will appeal to fans...
Unsung heroes of the Raj get treated to an extended fanfare.
In the mid-19th century, the British army dispatched a corps of soldiers to the Punjab, India’s far northwestern frontier, to fight the feared “Pathans” and other enemies of the empire’s progress. The majority of their officers were young men scarcely in their 20s whose bravery under fire became the stuff of legend. Focusing on half-a-dozen or so of these junior leaders, Allen (who is descended from John Nicholson, the youngest of the lot) offers an approving view of their work as they battle mustachioed brigands and revolutionary firebrands—such as Shahwali Khan (the feared Jafir of the Dagger Hand) and Jehandad Khan of the Tanoli (whose men were “brave and hardy and accounted the best swordsmen in Huzara”). Although young, the British officers assumed positions of great responsibility, challenging for men with much more experience; a 25-year-old named Harry Lumsden, for instance, commanded a force of 3,500 Sikh fighters, while a 29-year-old named Herbert Edwardes led an even larger army of Afghans into combat. Allen attributes these young men’s willingness to fight and die on the distant frontiers of empire to patriotism and religious fervor (“We have to make a leap of imagination from our own faithless age,” he sniffs, “back to an era when the promise of the Heavenly Kingdom for those who had fought the good fight was still very real”), overlooking the possibilities for profit and advancement that followed a pitched battle—to say nothing of thrill-seeking and other less exalted motives for serving the crown.
Though uncritical in his admiration for British arms, Allen provides a rousing and informative yarn that will appeal to fans of Lives of the Bengal Lancers and Gunga Din.Pub Date: May 1, 2001
ISBN: 0-7867-0861-1
Page Count: 384
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2001
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