The Pirate Hunter [MP3 CD - UNABRIDGED]

Rating:
Summary: A-Okay for this one...
Review: I truly enjoyed this book. It proposes that William Kidd
was not a pirate but a victim of special circumstance
that led to his [death] on the banks of the Thames.
Abandoned by the very people who supported his royal
commission to capture pirates and enemy ships, Captain Kidd
left New York as a privateer and returned three years after
as England's most wanted pirate. His case, as the author
suggests, is one of character assasination through rumor,
misinformation, and the twisting of facts. This book will
tell you so much about the seafaring trade in the 17th century,
how spices, dry goods, precious metals, jewels, and human lives
hang precariously over the likelihood of a pirate raid on
the high seas. There are many characters in the book, but
the author gives helpful references in case you have forgotten
who and how they figure in the story. The author touches on
17th century protocol between ships, be it to ascertain
superior firepower among friendly ships or as a ruse for
capture. The storytelling is easy and flowing. It held my
interest very much and I can recommend it to those who
love history and piracy.

Rating:
Summary: A very interesting and well-researched book.
Review: I'm a budding history buff, but I found this book quite interesting. Zacks takes a very different approach to the legend of William Kidd (notorious pirate or misunderstood hero?) I found myself hoping that this story hit the nail on the head. One thing is for sure, Zacks did a ton of research on this topic and to his credit, managed to hold this readers' interest throughout the book. I recommend this book to anyone who has a passing interest in pirates (or history in general).

Rating:
Summary: Pretty interesting
Review: if you like to learn about how people lived in other times. But, this is a history book. If you are looking for a swashbuckling adventure story then keep looking. One thing this will do is remind you how lucky we are to be alive today. Not that many British or French flotillas raiding our coasts these days.

Rating:
Summary: Get Ready To Stay Awake All Night - Reading & Smiling
Review: If you: prefer non-Fiction; are intrigued by the Age of Sail; would like to learn the True Story about Capt. Wm. Kidd; have a love/hate relationship with the Art of the Double-Cross, as a distant "literary" observer, of course; appreciate well-researched historical explanation, delightfully described by a first-rate true storyteller; and always suspected that somehow poor Capt. Kidd might have gotten a (very) raw deal; then you're in for one of the most enjoyable books you'll ever come across. I Loved It, and still do.

Rating:
Summary: Not as Good as I thought it Would Be
Review: In short, I was disappointed. I was looking for a great adventure, and found myself getting bogged down by the author's penchant for skipping around in different times. For example, you're reading about two pirates and have been reading about them for some time, when suddenly he states, "in fact, they had met some time before..." and then goes to another chapter about what occurred ten years before. He does this several times and I found it disconcerting, and in some cases, boring. This author also has a way of stating an unpleasantry in a blunt and vulgar manner, that looks like he's attempting to shock you. I didn't appreciate that.

Read Batavia's Graveyard, The Ice Master, or any other "sea adventure," before choosing this one.

Rating:
Summary: repaying the captain
Review: It is not too much to say that men like William Kidd made me a reader, and one suspects the same is true for many of my generation. In 5th
Grade an especially wise teacher exploited a glimmer of interest in explorers and pirates to get me to read just about every book I could find on the great European Age of Exploration and the attendant age of piracy. From Columbus to Ponce de Leon to LaSalle to Drake, I read them all with the promiscuity of the new enthusiast. Of course, one thing led to another and soon novels like Swiss Family Robinson and Treasure Island and Robinson Crusoe and the Hornblower books were stacked up on bookshelves like planes at a busy airport, waiting their turns to land and disgorge their contents. And then you had the movies...besides versions of the books above you had Peter Pan, Mutiny on the Bounty, Captain Blood, and, of course, Abbott and Costello Meet Captain Kidd (1952) with Charles Laughton, better remembered as Captain Bligh, reprising his role from Captain Kidd. Even Cap'n Crunch cereal fed a kids fantasies of taking to the sea in a wooden ship and finding adventure there. Thus did sailing men, even the rascals and dastards among them, like Captain Kidd, light a fire in at least one young mind.

All of which makes it a particularly pleasant experience to read this entertaining and authoritative rehabilitation of Kidd by Richard Zacks. As Mr. Zacks shows in exhaustive, and perhaps a bit exhausting, detail, William Kidd was not really the scoundrel pirate of legend but a duly deputized privateer, sent out to capture pirates in exchange for a share of their loot. It was only through a series of unfortunate mishaps and the repeated intervention of a hitherto uncelebrated nemesis, Robert Culliford, that Kidd himself came to be accused of piracy and ended up dangling from the end of a rope. Mr. Zacks relates the sorrowful tale of Kidd's 1696 expedition, that set out from Manhattan aboard the Adventure Galley but ended on a London gallows in 1701.

Mr. Zacks is a zealous advocate for Kidd's innocence and his passion is contagious. But Kidd makes for a doomed and tragic hero, what with a mutinous crew, an unsturdy ship, feckless backers, and the bedeviling presence time and again of his rival, Culliford. Kidd's behavior, as presented here, is genuinely admirable, particularly his determination to clear his name after he'd been wrongly accused of piracy in the taking of two ships. Kidd essentially put his own neck in the noose by sailing back to New York to face the charges.

It was in New York that the legend that he'd hidden his treasure arose, and Mr. Zacks shows us why. In fact, this is just one of many myths and legends that Mr. Zacks lays to rest, but part of what makes the book so enchanting is that the truths he reveals are just as compelling as the fictions they replace. In particular, despite the enduring image of ruthless captains wielding iron discipline, it's interesting to discover just how democratic the pirate society really was. But no truth is more beguiling than the real life Captain Kidd who we're introduced to. If the book is a bit too long and too minute by minute, which I believe to be the case, it is nonetheless carried along by Kidd and by our desire, though we know it futile, to see justice done him and barring that, our almost equally strong desire to see Culliford and some of the others who wronged Kidd get their comeuppances. But few do and as for Kidd :

William Kidd, born in Dundee, married in New York, hanged in London, was then hoisted in chains onto the oak gibbet at Tilbury. For years
afterward, men and women aboard all ships going to and coming from the trading metropolis of London could see him there swaying in the
breezes, the Admiralty's stark warning to anyone contemplating the merry life of piracy.

The poor benighted Captain would have to wait three hundred years for Richard Zacks to come along and set the record straight, which with the help of a painstakingly assembled historical record and a key piece of evidence uncovered in 1911 in the dense thickets of the British bureaucracy he does.

GRADE : A-

Rating:
Summary: HBO meets the History Channel
Review: It would be unfair to refer to Richard Zacks as a historian, as it would suggest a dry, stale read. "Pirate Hunter" has neither of these characteristics, as it is as vivid, and vibrant a book as I have read in many years. Due to Zacks' engaging storyteling abilities, you'll be reluctant to put it down - but the history and research Zacks' uses to compile this story empowers you just as a graduate level history survey would. "Pirate Hunter" has everything you'd expect from a tale of pirates, minus Captain Kidd - who turns out to be quite an honest man. Fear not, for there are ample accounts of other sinister pirates, who make Captain Kidd's legend look like something out of a Disney movie. I have seen and read many accounts of Kidd's legend, and all seem intent on abandoning a historian's quest for truth while embracing a child's thirst for a juicy tale. Zacks conclusively presents a case for Kidd's innocence and offers copious amounts of evidence to support it. Upon reading the last page, I found myself craving more pirates, more adventure, more history, and more Richard Zacks!

Rating:
Summary: Fantastic.
Review: Lots of incidental history of early New York. The most cleary documented pirate book I've ever read, Zack long exposure to primary source materials allows hime to bring a great deal of specific personal character to even incidental and anonymous persons who cross the track of Kidd or others in the book...

Rating:
Summary: The Notorious Pirate Who Wasn't
Review: Mention the name of Captain Kidd, and you can't help thinking of buried treasure, bloodthirsty tales of plunder, and general maritime mayhem. There was a real Captain Kidd, and he did sail among the pirates, but we all have the wrong idea about him, according to Richard Zacks, whose _The Pirate Hunter: The True Story of Captain Kidd_ (Theia / Hyperion) sets the record straight. William Kidd was a master mariner who lived in New York, on Wall Street, no less, at the end of the seventeenth century. He had a wife and daughter. "He was no career cutthroat, no cartoon Blackbeard, terrifying his prey by putting flaming matches in his hair." Kidd was a respectable sea captain, who had enormously bad luck in his endeavors to hunt pirates for profit.

Kidd was no pirate, but a privateer, recruited by powerful Lords and merchants to rob from the pirates that had robbed from the merchants. He had a secret commission from King William III himself, who privately took a ten percent share of any profits that Kidd might come up with. Kidd sailed on _Adventure Galley_, a three-master built in England and launched in 1696 specifically for Kidd's mission, with a crew of 150. Many of the crew had been pirates themselves, and Kidd was putting himself in an uncomfortable management position. He had nothing but bad luck in finding pirates to rob, but even before he did so, rumors of his being a pirate himself had sprung up. After his crew mutinied, he tried to return to his home in New York, but discovered to his surprise that he was the most wanted man in America. He sneaked back towards New York, and in another unpiratical act, sought the help of his lawyer. He made overtures to Lord Bellomont, his prime backer, but the gouty and treacherous Bellomont, having learned of the extent and whereabouts of the haul Kidd had brought back, put him into jail. Kidd was shipped in chains to England. The corruption involved in his jail term and his trial are well detailed here.

Zacks has dug into account books, diaries, and forgotten, centuries-old governmental documents to bring out the truth about Kidd, but this is far from a dusty academic account. Zacks has fun telling us about how pirates really lived, how politics was conducted, the difficulties of shipboard life, and how different the times were from our own. For example, he writes of a messenger: "As he reached the East River, the Manhattan skyline loomed: a windmill and two church steeples towering over a seaside row of three-story gable roofs." Kidd's was a wild and eventful life, even if it wasn't the life of a pirate. My guess is that Zacks's book will never overcome the centuries of folklore that have accumulated around Kidd's story, but the true story is still a rousing treasure.

Rating:
Summary: A Fantastic Voyage into the Era of Privateers and Pirates
Review: Meticulously researched and masterfully told, THE PIRATE HUNTER transports the reader back in time so as to stand in the sea boots of the real Captian Kidd.

Richard Zacks does a marvelous job of weaving mountains of historical information into a compeling story of a wronged and misunderstood Captian Kidd. Extremely entertaining and loaded with whimsical insights into life of that time, both onboard the vessel and off. This well told tale will please any reader and is a must read for anyone who enjoys tales of sailing ships in a bygone era.