Discussed:

Pirates! In an Adventure with Scientists!
and
Pirates! In an Adventure with Ahab! by Gideon Defoe (Pantheon)

Pirates! by Celia Rees (Bloomsbury USA)

Pirate Utopias: Moorish Corsairs and European Renegades by Peter Lamborn Wilson (Autonomedia)

    Not since Long John Silver strode out of the pages of Treasure Island by Robert Louis Stevenson have pirates so stridently captured the imaginations of readers and writers. It seems everywhere you look today, pirates are all the rage-from Hollywood blockbusters to Lego toy blocks. And who can forget the immense popularity of Talk Like a Pirate Day! (Be sure to mark your calendar for September 19^th.) Whether it's light-hearted comic fiction or weighty historical analysis you seek, here are a few contemporary treasures to whet your appetite for further exploration of all things PIRATE!

    Fans of last year's heavily punctuated Pirates! In an Adventure With Scientists! will be thrilled with this year's even funnier Pirate episode, Pirates! In an Adventure with Ahab! The sequel has even more ridiculous footnotes, bigger and better hams, helpful and hilarious diagrams, and gleefully mocks that most venerated of sea classics, Moby Dick. This installment also features a lot of crossdressing; a bloodthirsty, baby-eating girl pirate; and cowboys. The dubiously named "Gideon Defoe" claims in his author blurb that he wrote the original Pirates! book to impress a girl, and failed. I say she's a damn fool. The dustjacket promises a slew of wildly improbable sequels (The Pirates! In an Adventure with Communists! The Pirates! In an Adventure with Your Mother! The Seven Habits of Highly Successful Pirates! and so on), and I can only hope some of these come true.

    For those who may have developed a genuine interest in the subject, there are two very readable and informative books available. Pirates! (no relation), by Celia Rees, is a well-researched, fast paced young adult novel about a pair of girls, one born a slave, one of English gentry, who escape the strictures of their lives for the freedom of the seas. Rees gives a good sense of the lives of the pirates and why the pirate life, with its quasi-democratic institutions and its code of equality, would appeal to the disenfranchised. It's also got romance, intrigue, and incredibly gory swordfights. Fabulous!

    More scholarly, but no less enjoyable, is Peter Lamborn Wilson's Pirate Utopias: Moorish Corsairs and European Renegades. Wilson explores the allure the pirate life held for 17^th century Europeans, who converted to both Islam and piracy by the thousands. Some were drawn by the freedom and social equality offered by the pirate life, some were attracted by the romance and exoticism of the east. While he does go into a great deal of detail, particularly about the development of the Pirate Republic of Sale, he's never dull. He extensively cites the pirate speeches in Defoe's General History of the Pyrates, bringing us such colorful quotes as "They vilify us, the scoundrels do, when there is only this difference, they rob the poor under the cover of law, forsooth, and we plunder the rich under the protection of our own courage". This Robin Hood-like sentiment is repeatedly expressed, reminding us that the outlaw has been a romantic folk hero for hundreds of years. Wilson's sections on sexual transgression are also very interesting, and will make you look at Johnny Depp's heavily eyelinered Captain Jack Sparrow in an entirely different light.