Halloween Time Books Reviewed

The Pirate Queen: Queen Elizabeth I, Her Pirate Adventurers, and the Dawn of Empire, By: Susan Ronald
Non-fiction: history, 383 pages copyright 2007

Dead Pirates always seam to love Halloween and this book has some that make the ones in horror films seam nice by comparison. (And they were alive at the time!) It also tells you a lot about how people that today would be called pirates lived. (The term wasn’t in use at the time, and many of the pirates were working secretly for the Queen making them see themselves differently then we would.) You also learn all the things about the great English explorers and adventurers you learned about in school that they wouldn’t teach you in school. Which is of course all of the bad things that they were really up to and all of the pirate booty they got doing it. And the only things you really wanted to know. Sure Sir. Francis Drake was the 1st English man to sail around the world but he also killed a mutineer, attacked the Spanish, stole a major part of the spice trade from the Portuguese with no power to do so, and renamed ships left and right, occasionally using highly inappropate names. This book is also in-depth on the politics of the day making it a good read for people into political history, or who just want to know more about real pirates.