Drawing on extensive original documents, David A.
Ill prepared for such hardship, the men responded with incompetence and infighting only the leadership of Captain John Smith averted doom for the first permanent English settlement in the New World.The Jamestown colony is one of the great survival stories of American history, and this book brings it fully to life for the first time. Instead, they found disease, hunger, and hostile natives. (Oct.A New York Times Notable Book and a San Jose Mercury News Top 20 Nonfiction Book of 2003 In 1606, approximately 105 British colonists sailed to America, seeking gold and a trade route to the Pacific. BOMC, QPB and History Book Club alternates. This is a splendid work of serious narrative history. But it was also for all participants a site, at the start of the nation's history, of danger, horror and death. If there's a fault in a work built unobtrusively on the best scholarship, it's Price's insistence that we see Virginia principally as a place that rewarded courage and hard labor-for white men-in the service of self-advancement and personal liberty. The book's leitmotif is the interaction of differing cultures and men, like the British gentry, whom Smith scorned for refusing to adapt to hard colonial labor, and the wily Indians, who resorted to starving out the colonists and in 1622 massacred many of them. But no one will come away from this work without heightened admiration also for the natives, especially Chief Powhatan, and greater knowledge of the introduction of a third people, African slaves, into the Chesapeake. Smith is of course at the center of the tale, because rarely did a colonial leader so bountifully combine experience, insight, vision, strength of character and leadership skills to overcome extraordinary odds.
Price relates the entire riveting story of the founding of Virginia. Fortunately, the book ranges more widely than that. Journalist Price's subtitle suggests that the book might be only about John Smith and Pocahontas-who "crossed into one another's cultures more than any other Englishman or native woman had done"-as well as about Pocahontas's eventual husband, John Rolfe. This sparkling book retells a beloved tale in modern terms.
0 kommentar(er)
