World Atlas of Pirates: Treasures And Treachery On The Seven Seas--In Maps, Tall Tales, And Pictures

by Angus Konstam

 Lively, accessible text by pirate expert Angus Konstam explains how piracy grew and flourished from the early buccaneers to the rogues of popular legends, how it has been snuffed out, and how it has reared its head again with the machine-gun-toting pirates operating on today’s high seas.

Genres: Pirates, History, Nonfiction, Research

256 pages, Hardcover

First published October 1, 2009

About the author

Angus Konstam is a Scottish writer of popular history. Born in Aberdeen, Scotland and raised on the Orkney Islands, he has written more than a hundred books on maritime history, naval history, historical atlases, with a special focus on the history of piracy.

Reviews

[Brittany McCann · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book is amazingly well put together. It has a little bit of everything about Pirates. It covers different lore, realistic facts, accurate pirate maps, and real pirate news.

The layout is beautiful and enjoyable. There is a perfect mixture of artifacts with narratives and tales. I honestly want to buy this book after reading it. There are not many books of this caliber, and you can tell a LOT of time went into compiling this.

Excellent job to Andus Konstam. This is great if you are at all interested in pirates or the history of piracy.

5 Stars

[Karen · Rating 4 out of 5]

Interesting.

[Yasmin · Rating 3 out of 5]

Nice glossy pages and many pictures, unfortunately not much on information for each section. And if there are people who can't tell the difference from real pirates to the ones on the big screen well they must live a charmed life to believe in fantasies, but they will find reality to be quite a shock. For the rest of us that do know the difference between what pirates were like and Captain Jack Sparrow for example it smacks of insulting our intelligence to make the constant referral that everyone has been lulled by fictional books and Hollywood. The author also claimed he would show us the warts of pirates and apart from occasionally mentioning pirates tortured people and the penalties for betrayal we don't see how cruel and ruthless pirates were. Fictional books and Hollywood may have skated over these warts but for the most part so did the author.

[Koen Denolf · Rating 1 out of 5]

Read it in a Dutch translation and that might have blurred my view on this: numerous (basic) grammar errors etc.
Besides that, I was struck about the redundancy and the repetition of simple facts. It's obvious that the writer gives a summary of only one primary source. Most pirates don't become real persons, their character is superficial. Names of vessels are dropped, but that makes the names expendable: it never gets personal. A pity, because I had been looking for a book like this for a while.

[Jbondandrews · Rating 5 out of 5]

I have read a book of Angus Konstam's before and he as always provides a worthwhile read. I recommend this book to anyone who is interested in pirates or history in general.