About this title: < b>A New York Times Bestselling Author< /b>< P>From the perilous ocean crossing to the shared bounty of the first Thanksgiving, the Pilgrim settlement of New England has become enshrined as our most sacred national myth. Yet, as bestselling author Nathaniel Philbrick reveals in his spellbinding new book, the true story of the Pilgrims is much more than the well-known tale of piety and sacrifice; it is a fifty-five-year epic that is at once tragic, heroic, exhilarating, and profound.< P>Simultaneous Publication with Viking Penguin's Standard Print Edition.
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Description: Good. Light shelf wear and minimal interior marks. Millions of satisfied customers and climbing. Thriftbooks is the name you can trust, guaranteed. Spend Less. Read More. read more
Description: Good. Light shelf wear and minimal interior marks. Millions of satisfied customers and climbing. Thriftbooks is the name you can trust, guaranteed. Spend Less. Read More. read more
Description: Acceptable. Former Library book. Shows definite wear, and perhaps considerable marking on inside. Shipped to over one million happy customers. Your purchase benefits world literacy! read more
Description: Acceptable. Book is in good reading condition. Cover has wear at edges and corners, and may have creases. Spine has wear at edges and creases. read more
Description: Good. 0786286202 Former library item may have library binding and show stamps, stickers or other marks. Items not meeting quality expectations may be returned. Due to the large scale of our operation, we do not have access to the specific contents/condition of our items. read more
Description: Good. 0786286202 Former library item may have library binding and show stamps, stickers or other marks. Items not meeting quality expectations may be returned. Due to the large scale of our operation, we do not have access to the specific contents/condition of our items. read more
Description: Very Good. Great condition for a used book! Minimal wear. Shipped to over one million happy customers. Your purchase benefits world literacy! read more
Description: Good. Shows some signs of wear, and may have some markings on the inside. Shipped to over one million happy customers. Your purchase benefits world literacy! read more
Description: Very Good. Great condition for a used book! Minimal wear. Shipped to over one million happy customers. Your purchase benefits world literacy! read more
Description: Good. Shows some signs of wear, and may have some markings on the inside. Shipped to over one million happy customers. Your purchase benefits world literacy! read more
Description: Acceptable. Shows definite wear, and perhaps considerable marking on inside. Shipped to over one million happy customers. Your purchase benefits world literacy! read more
Description: Very Good. Great condition for a used book! Minimal wear. Shipped to over one million happy customers. Your purchase benefits world literacy! read more
"In this account of early colonial New England, Philbrick reveals far more about the Mayflower's story than what most of us pick up in second grade Thanksgiving celebrations. In fact, the title is somewhat misleading as the book actually contains two interlocked narratives. The first concerns the Pilgrims (and the other Englishmen who sailed with them) who came over on the famous ship and established the colony at Plymouth. Philbrick's depiction of their struggles points to the depth of motivation (or foolhardiness) that drove a group of mostly urban tradesman and their families into the wilderness. Without skill in hunting, fishing, or farming, they moved beyond the edge of civilization as they knew it and entered a world of hunger, pestilence, violence, and death. The second narrative shows a very different New England. Here Philbrick shows the broader Massachusetts Bay Colony one and two generations later than the Pilgrims arrival. The lives and livelihood of these colonists are far more secure. To keep it so, they are engaged in a bitter war with the diminishing tribes of Native Americans of the region. Just as Philbrick explores the cultural, social, and political dynamics of the English settlers, he offers an equally compelling glimpse into the societies of these Native Americans and their political structure. The common theme across these tales is the ferocity of life on the edge of the wilderness, but Philbrik juxtaposes the two generations of colonists by emphasizing their relationships with the Native Americans of New England. The earlier settlers depended on alliances with at least some tribes for survival, and they opened up trade and even personal ties for peaceful coexistence. The latter generation no longer finds itself dependent on native protection; indeed, they tend to see the Native Americans as "in the way". On the whole, Philbrick offers an evenhanded view of this competition including horrific atrocities inflicted by both sides - neither glorifying nor entirely demonizing the English settlers - though it is difficult to avoid sympathy for the plight of the native inhabitants. Ultimately, Philbrick shows that the story of the Mayflower (and likely many other historical episodes encountered only briefly or superficially) are both familiar and veiled - offering far more depth than we might have imagined in those elementary stories of turkeys and buckled-shoe settlers."
"We Americans are simple creatures. We take our complex history and paint it with water colors. To keep mixing metaphors, this leaves us with something that is palatable and easy-to-digest. Come to think of it, this is not just an American trait. When it comes to national identities, all humans tend to be reductionists. (Just a few weeks ago, the French celebrated the Bastille Day as a kind of Independence Day, when in fact in marked the starting date of the murder of thousands of innocent human beings. Viva la France!)
Picture the Pilgrims with me: grim, black coated men with stiff white collars and funny hats with buckles. They grip their blunderbusses while their doughy, sexless wives grip their elbows. In the brush, a sly turkey laughs.
Mayflower is the story of how it really went down. Like all works of revisionism, it is both enlightening, and a little disappointing. Sometimes it's nice to be left with our illusions; in this case, the illusion being that white men and Indians were able to come together in mutual cooperation.
The reality, of course, is that the white men took the Indian's corn, took their turkey, then shot them (metaphorically) when they turned around. Later, they shot them for real. In the hundreds.
The story starts with the voyage of the titular ship:
The Mayflower was a typical merchant vessel of her day: square-rigged and beak bowed, with high, castlelike superstructures fore and aft that protected her cargo and crew in the worst weather, but made beating against the wind a painfully inefficient endeavor. Rated at 180 tons (meaning her hold was capable of accomodating 180 casks or tuns of wine), she was approximately three times the size of the Speedwell and about one hundred feet in length.
Nathaniel Philbrick, who wrote the splendid little whaling book, In the Heart of the Sea, once again tells a fast-paced, informative story, filled with little interesting factoids that make you go, hmm. In this case, however, he is hampered by a dearth of sources. Indeed, the famous voyage of the Mayflower is told in only a few pages, mostly because the inveterate diarist William Bradford (full disclosure, I'm distantly related to him...very distantly) only devoted a couple paragraphs.
The lack of primary sources is not Philbrick's fault, but it hampers any telling of this story. By necessity, he must rely on Bradford a great deal, which gives a one-sided view of what happened. Famous events such as the signing of the Mayflower Compact are told through his eyes.
The book started slowly, but picks up steam up bit when we get on shore. We get to meet Benjamin Church, who later became such a famous chronicler of King Philip's War. We also meet the irascible Myles Standish, one of the livelier characters of this drama:
Myles Standish was officially designated their captain. A small man with a broad, powerful physique and reddish hair, Standish also had something of a chip on his shoulder. He seems to have been born on the Isle of Man off the west coast of England, and even though he was descended from "the house of Standish of Standish," his rightful claim to ancestral lands had been, according to his own account, "surreptitiously detained from me," forcing him to seek his fortune as a mercenary in Holland. Well educated and well read (he owned a copy of Homer's The Iliad and Caesar's Commentaries), he appears to have conducted himself with a haughty impulsiveness that did not endear him to some of the settlers, one of whom later claimed that the Plymouth captain "looks like a silly boy, as is in utter contempt."
The centerpiece of the book is "the first Thanksgiving." The day that was actually created by Lincoln and is now celebrated with football is given an unvarnished retelling. It was a celebration of the Pilgrims being brought back from the brink with the help of the Wampanoag Indians Massasoit and Squanto.
Countless Victorian-era engravings notwithstanding, the Pilgrims did not spend the day sitting around a long table draped with a white linen cloth, clasping each other's hands in prayer as a few curious Indians looked on. Instead of an English affair, the First Thanksgiving soon became an overwhelmingly Native celebration...Most of the celebrants stood, squatted, or sat on the ground as they clustered around outdoor fires, where the deer and birds turned on wooden spits and where pottages - stews into which varieties of meats and vegetables were thrown - simmered invitingly.
This thanksgiving was the culmination of a great deal of sacrifice, risk, luck, and shrewdness. We often view Massasoit as having saved the Pilgrims from starvation; what we don't often dwell upon is the fact that the Pilgrims chose Massasoit as an ally, and in doing so, became a power player in the region.
Philbrick's story features the First Thanksgiving just over a hundred pages into the book. There are well over two hundred pages left. Thus, after the turkeys are eaten, Philbrick takes the burnished image of interracial cooperation/gluttony and tears it to pieces.
Because what follows is treachery and war. Anyone buying this book to read in preparation of the holiday should know that Philbrick is not interested in holidays. The Mayflower/Pilgrims/Thanksgiving angle is quickly left behind. Two thirds of the book are devoted to Pilgrim/Indian politics and King Philip's War.
This is certainly interesting stuff. King Philip's War was an incredibly brutal affair. Proportionally, it was one of the bloodiest conflicts on American soil (1 out of 65 English and 1 out of 20 Indians were slain). Four of Massasoit's children died in the war (Massasoit himself was already dead). In the end, King Philip was shot, drawn-and-quartered, and beheaded. His head was displayed in Plymouth for 20 years.
Happy Thanksgiving!
As hard as Philbrick tries to breathe life into this story, there's a coldness and distance to it. So much of the story is supposition: what might have happened. Again, I blame the primary sources. The published contemporary accounts just don't allow us to feel the history, for these accounts often had a dual purpose, and being informative was a secondary concern (for a great discussion of Benjamin Church and the literature of this period, I recommend Richard Slotkin's Regeneration Through Violence).
I was very excited to read this book but I was ultimately disappointed. However, as a readable history of this period, with its complex inter-tribal politics, I doubt you can do much better."
"I love Nathaniel Philbrick! He writes the best nonfiction accounts of history I've ever read (admittedly it's not an area in which I'm well versed). Growing up in America, how could anyone not know of the Mayflower. But my memories of learning of it are like a cartoon; remember those cutouts of Pilgrims and Indians? This book fills the cartoon out into a very rich, and suspenseful, movie. I'm glad to understand more about some of the impulses that formed our brave land. Very detailed and extremely precise and I'm sure his history is as accurate as can be, and the places! my, my, my, you can tell he lives in the same locale as this history because his depictions of the woods and the weather and the wildlife that would have been present in that vicinity at that time is one borne of experience. Having visited the area it was fun to look up on a map where different events occurred. It is a sad story as well as one of strength and triumph over adversity and many other qualities we associate with "America the Beautiful"."
"This was a great book! Philbrick did a phenomenal job in presenting the story of the Mayflower settlers. I learned things I did not know. I hadn't actually realized how difficult it had been for them to settle and survive, especially that first year. This is an absolutely riveting essay of those first hard years and obstacles those first pilgrims had to face. Definitely recommend this to anyone interested in the historical facts about those incredibly courageous first settlers."
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