Pirate's Life

July 1, 2007
Gr 4-7-These titles provide a fairly detailed history with a focus on the Golden Age of Piracy that lasted from the late 1600s until the mid-1700s. Distinctions between privateers and pirates are made clear, and a brief discussion of more modern-day pirates is included. "A Pirate's Life" conveys a good bit of information, from the grim realities of life at sea to the role that many women played in piracy. Mentions of popular culture and media representation occasionally detract from the more serious nature of the presentations, thus landing them somewhere between report fodder and fun browsing books. The artwork provides a fairly conventional view of pirates and doesn't add much to the text. The writing, while clear and straightforward, can be repetitive, and information sometimes overlaps between the two books. Librarians looking to beef up their pirate collections would be better off with titles such as Milton Meltzer's "Piracy and Plunder" (Dutton, 2001) or Moira Butterfield's "Pirates and Smugglers" (Kingfisher, 2005)."Jody Kopple, Shady Hill School, Cambridge, MA"

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