A great walk in world of piracy in the 17th and 18th centuries, in the Atlantic.

Victor Suthren used the limited information on the "Dread Pirate Bart" and his life, and created not only a grat overview of his life, but he also depicted the pirate life perfectly. Captain Roberts is the perfect guide through this world of swords, gun, pillaging, and deadly confrontations at sea. It's colourful, engaging and addictive. I couldn't get enough of it. It's the perfect balance between fiction and history.

Get ready for a swashbuckling adventure! This book was fabulous and I absolutely LOVED it! Full of great information, and written around a fabulous story, get to know the King of the Pirates as never before!

Looking for a highly detailed book on piracy? Black Flag of the North is a well written book dedicated to Black Bart Roberts. One of the most successful pirates of all time, Roberts doesn't get nearly as much play in popular culture as he should. Victor Suthren is working to change that with this book.

Mr. Suthren has crafted a nice little work on piracy in the 17th and 18th Century Atlantic. As far as a biography of the "Dread Pirate Bart," this book does provide a general overview of his life. Due to the limited information available about his life, Mr. Suthren focuses on building the world that Captain Roberts lived in, and a harsh world it was, full of disease, violence, and the unforgiving sea. Across this sea sail draconian naval and merchant ships, equally brutal but more egalitarian pirates, and... proto-Canadian fisherman because this work had a Canadian publisher (this means that the Canadian coast plays a more prominent role than it would otherwise have, although this is a generally overlooked area in the general history of piracy). Overall this is a generally competent walk (or sail in this case) through the world of piracy, particularly in the early 1700s, with Captain Roberts acting as the readers guide the short, brutal, but occasionally marry life of a pirate.

This work has issues with repetition. This book has a problem with redundancy. The previous two sentences illustrate an odd problem that this book has, in spite of its relatively short length, with including repeated lines and very similar quotes that just drill in the same message. The first couple chapters focus on how difficult life at sea was at the time, but this is still repeatedly brought up in later chapters. At least four or five times the reader is reminded that the Royal Navy did not have standardized uniforms for officers until the 1750s.

Also, quotes by contemporary authors are a bit excessive. Marcus Rediker should probably be credited as a coauthor, his works seem to be quoted every few pages. On the plus side, this introduced me to Mr. Rediker, whose works I will now look into. On the downside, it doesn't speak highly of Mr. Suthren, even though he has written a generally engaging work.

Overall, I did enjoy this work as a nice little introduction to life at sea in the "Golden Age" of piracy. It is hampered by its repetitiveness and reliance on other authors but I did enjoy this book and plowed through it fairly quickly.