The Pirate Hunter : The True Story of Captain Kidd

Rating:
Summary: Puts you right in the thick of it! ARRR
Review: This is a great summer book. Fun to read and good subject. Lots of information that somehow was left out of our history class in school. If you ever played pirates as a kid, or enjoy history, you will like this book. Well done.

Rating:
Summary: Too Much
Review: This is a tremendously researched book. Mr. Zachs obviously pored over thousands of pages of material - unfortunately, he had a difficcult time culling what was not relevant enough to add to the book. He simply included too much material.

This is the story of Captain Kidd - pirate or not? Mr. Zachs is persuasive that Kidd was not a pirate but a privateer with a commission from the King's highest confidantes. Mr. Zachs tracks Kidd on his privateering journey along with that of a pirate living a parallel career named Culliver. The juxtaposition of the two is well done. Kidd - honorable to a fault, and to a noose - fights becoming a pirate. Culliver, on the other hand, lives the pirate's life throughout, avoids the noose and walks off with a fortune in ill-gained booty.

Th problem I had with this book is that Mr. Zachs included sooo many details that the forest was often lost for the trees. There were constant recitations of cargo statistics and individual's shares of booty. These were detailed to the last bale of cloth and last piece of eight. He carried these detailed recitations to journeys of other ships only very tangentially related to the theme.

I wish Mr. Zach's had left out a few hundred statistics relating to cargo and focused more on the broad picture. He gave short shrift to how the backers of the mission avoided the scandal of being associated to Kidd and how England had been turned against the man.

If you want a well-detailed and well-researched tome about piracy and Kidd this is the book for you. If you want a clear picture of the forces driving Kidd and his eventual demise, you have to work too hard with this book to get it. I would only recommend this book to those who are deeply into piracy and its history.

Rating:
Summary: Too Much
Review: This is a tremendously researched book. Mr. Zachs obviously pored over thousands of pages of material - unfortunately, he had a difficcult time culling what was not relevant enough to add to the book. He simply included too much material.

This is the story of Captain Kidd - pirate or not? Mr. Zachs is persuasive that Kidd was not a pirate but a privateer with a commission from the King's highest confidantes. Mr. Zachs tracks Kidd on his privateering journey along with that of a pirate living a parallel career named Culliver. The juxtaposition of the two is well done. Kidd - honorable to a fault, and to a noose - fights becoming a pirate. Culliver, on the other hand, lives the pirate's life throughout, avoids the noose and walks off with a fortune in ill-gained booty.

Th problem I had with this book is that Mr. Zachs included sooo many details that the forest was often lost for the trees. There were constant recitations of cargo statistics and individual's shares of booty. These were detailed to the last bale of cloth and last piece of eight. He carried these detailed recitations to journeys of other ships only very tangentially related to the theme.

I wish Mr. Zach's had left out a few hundred statistics relating to cargo and focused more on the broad picture. He gave short shrift to how the backers of the mission avoided the scandal of being associated to Kidd and how England had been turned against the man.

If you want a well-detailed and well-researched tome about piracy and Kidd this is the book for you. If you want a clear picture of the forces driving Kidd and his eventual demise, you have to work too hard with this book to get it. I would only recommend this book to those who are deeply into piracy and its history.