Marla Parker's Weblog

Republic of Pirates
I'm in an all day meeting where a colleague mentioned she has a pirate fetish, and her presentation was spiced up with plenty of pirate references and fun images. I'm inspired to blog about this book and my gratitude to my mother-in-law, who gave it to my 12 year old son.

Near the end of the school year, I asked my son what he was reading.

"Nothing!" he replied with glee. "We're done for the year! no more book reports." Clearly his plan was to not read all summer, which was not my plan for him at all. I put the problem off. Just before the end of the school year, after a grandparents visit, I noticed my son reading.

"Where did you get that book?"

"Grammy gave it to me. It is really good, you should read it, too." I was too busy silently thanking my mother-in-law to pay attention to the book. But my son persisted and after he finished the book, he said: "Mom, really, you have to read this book! It is awesome."

So of course I did. I've made him read enough books, fair is fair, and I never regretted reading all the Artimis Fowl books, and he was right, Republic of Pirates: Being the True and Surprising Story of the Caribbean Pirates and the Man Who Brought Them Down is a great book.

The author, Colin Woodard, writes this non-fiction book like a novel, and you certainly catch the romance around the pirates, and yet at the same time, the brutality and ugliness. He does such a good job of making the pirates very human. And very different. They are not cookie cutter equivalents. Some are smarter, some are braver, some are opportunists, some are idealists, freedom fighter types in the same century as the American Revolution, a few generations before it. The scope of the book is limited to the Golden Age of Piracy, 1715-1725, with a little bit of history from before that decade to set the stage for the main characters.

Lastly, the plight and escapades of Africans as slaves or pirates are fascinating, though the amount of actual information the author could scrape together is tantalizingly scant.