An engrossing and historically grounded yarn.
Marquis’ (The Fourth Pularchek, 2017, etc.) historical novel, based on a true story, aims to rehabilitate the pirate Blackbeard, delivering a wealth of information about his era and place in history.
Edward Thache Jr., better known as the notorious, larger-than-life “Blackbeard,” was a British naval officer–turned–privateer and pirate. He and his fellow pirates, ardent Jacobites, hated the German interloper, George I, and the whole British establishment. Contrary to government propaganda of the day, Blackbeard was quite civilized—although, by design, he cultivated a very fearsome mien. This tale, beginning in 1715, shows how he preferred to simply approach a ship and terrify its captain and crew into surrendering; remarkably, this almost always worked. Meanwhile, Blackbeard’s nemesis, the odious Alexander Spotswood, lieutenant governor of Virginia, was determined to put an end to the pirate by whatever means. The protagonist’s beautiful love interest, Margaret of Marcus Hook, is a key element in the story, and other real-life historical characters in this densely populated book include Caesar, a slave that Blackbeard rescued and made his right-hand man; Stede Bonnet, successful Barbados planter–turned–hapless freebooter; and Black Sam Bellamy, a young hothead who saw pirates like himself as Robin Hood figures. Marquis writes quite well, but his real contribution with this book is historical, as the age of piracy was remarkably short, and Blackbeard’s turn on the stage was only two years: 1715 to 1717. The book’s subtitle, The Birth of America, is intriguing, and Marquis shows it to be more apt than one might suppose. A pirate ship, as he portrays it here, was a true democracy in many ways. He also shows how the colonists, many of whom had been born in the New World, had begun to identify themselves as American, not British; they were very ambivalent about the pirates, whom many saw as heroic figures. Overall, this is a thoroughly researched book that finely draws the pirate life; one can almost smell the bilge and salt air and taste the rum.
An engrossing and historically grounded yarn.Pub Date: Feb. 6, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-943593-21-7
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Mount Sopris Publishing
Review Posted Online: April 17, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2018
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
This is a masterly novel. It will appeal to all lovers of fiction of the first order.
This large, stately, and intensely powerful new novel by the author of Terms of Endearment and The Last Picture Show is constructed around a cattle drive—an epic journey from dry, hard-drinking south Texas, where a band of retired Texas Rangers has been living idly, to the last outpost and the last days of the old, unsettled West in rough Montana.
The time is the 1880s. The characters are larger than life and shimmer: Captain Woodrow Call, who leads the drive, is the American type of an unrelentingly righteous man whose values are puritanical and pioneering and whose orders, which his men inevitably follow, lead, toward the end, to their deaths; talkative Gus McCrae, Call's best friend, learned, lenient, almost magically skilled in a crisis, who is one of those who dies; Newt, the unacknowledged 17-year-old son of Captain Call's one period of self-indulgence and the inheritor of what will become a new and kinder West; and whores, drivers, misplaced sheriffs and scattered settlers, all of whom are drawn sharply, engagingly, movingly. As the rag-tag band drives the cattle 3,000 miles northward, only Call fails to learn that his quest to conquer more new territories in the West is futile—it's a quest that perishes as men are killed by natural menaces that soon will be tamed and by half-starved renegades who soon will die at the hands of those less heroic than themselves. McMurtry shows that it is a quest misplaced in history, in a landscape that is bare of buffalo but still mythic; and it is only one of McMurtry's major accomplishments that he does it without forfeiting a grain of the characters' sympathetic power or of the book's considerable suspense.
This is a masterly novel. It will appeal to all lovers of fiction of the first order.Pub Date: June 1, 1985
ISBN: 068487122X
Page Count: 872
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Sept. 30, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 1985
IN THE NEWS
SEEN & HEARD
A strict report, worthy of sympathy.
A violent surfacing of adolescence (which has little in common with Tarkington's earlier, broadly comic, Seventeen) has a compulsive impact.
"Nobody big except me" is the dream world of Holden Caulfield and his first person story is down to the basic, drab English of the pre-collegiate. For Holden is now being bounced from fancy prep, and, after a vicious evening with hall- and roommates, heads for New York to try to keep his latest failure from his parents. He tries to have a wild evening (all he does is pay the check), is terrorized by the hotel elevator man and his on-call whore, has a date with a girl he likes—and hates, sees his 10 year old sister, Phoebe. He also visits a sympathetic English teacher after trying on a drunken session, and when he keeps his date with Phoebe, who turns up with her suitcase to join him on his flight, he heads home to a hospital siege. This is tender and true, and impossible, in its picture of the old hells of young boys, the lonesomeness and tentative attempts to be mature and secure, the awful block between youth and being grown-up, the fright and sickness that humans and their behavior cause the challenging, the dramatization of the big bang. It is a sorry little worm's view of the off-beat of adult pressure, of contemporary strictures and conformity, of sentiment….
A strict report, worthy of sympathy.Pub Date: June 15, 1951
ISBN: 0316769177
Page Count: -
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: Nov. 2, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 1951
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
APPRECIATIONS
© Copyright 2026 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.
