Mayflower, Nathaniel Philbrick

Mayflower:  A Story of Courage, Community, and War by Nathaniel Philbrick is the story of the Mayflower that brought the pilgrims to the New World.  I bought this book when a friend of my wife's came to visit.  Before it rose to the top of my unread books, I had passed it onto my mother-in-law to enjoy and she felt it was excellent.

Started:  1/11/2017

Completed: 10/22/2018

Recommendation: Recommended

Recommended By: Nobody

Review:

An interesting story that tells me a lot I did not know about the journey itself.  I also learned a ton about King Phillip's war.  For some reason I thought that King Phillip must have been an English king.  I was completely wrong, King Phillip was an Indian.  The story ends well into the 1800s, so it is much more than the story of the Mayflower itself.  It took me a long time to get through because I was listening on audio and I had to return the CDs to the library.  Recently, I was able to get them out once more and finished the last few.

This book is not a page turner.  This book is a rather slow read largely because the topics discussed are so discordant from the taught history.  I have to agree with Philbrick that I went quickly from the pilgrims to the civil war without really considering what came in between.

In The Heart of The Sea, Nathaniel Philbrick

In the Heart of the Sea:  The Tragedy of the Whaleship Essex by Nathaniel Philbrick received the National Book Award in 2000 and was subsequently made into an unsuccessful moving by Ron Howard.  I listened to the unabridged audio version which tells the true story behind Moby Dick.

Started: 12/9/2016
Completed: 1/9/2017
Recommendation: Recommended, but you need a strong stomach
Recommended By: Nobody

Words for which I sought help:

consanguinity -- kinship; close relationship or close connection

Review:

The book starts at the end with the survivors being found by another whaleship.  That is as good a place as any.  There is a fair amount of time spent talking in graphic detail about the process of killing and recovering the oil from a whale.  It is nauseating.  This is a recurring theme, however, throughout the book and seems to pop up again just when you might have thought you'd been through it enough.  One would think it would pale in comparison to the cannibalism, but it does not.

This is a well written book that is difficult to assimilate.  The story is gripping and the characters are relatively interesting.  There are tons of interesting facts about whaling I never considered (like a boat only had around 20 people on it) and the implications of the hunting on the family (whale hunting took about 3 years per voyage).  The chronicling of bad judgement and bad mistakes (as well as bad luck) is enough to make you think that the survivors must have used up their bad luck in this one event.  Of course, they didn't and the whole story is more interesting for it.