Under the Black Flag

David Cordingly’s book is useful for its accurate and lively attempt to separate pirate facts from public fiction. He sifts through childhood tales of wooden legs and parrots to highlight the harsh realities experienced by most of these violent rogues. The tortures he describes serve to remind the reader that these were desperate times full of volatile career criminals. And the women were often as dangerous as their male counterparts! While considering Anne Bonny and Mary Read, he questions “Were there other women pirates?” and “How was it possible for a woman to pass herself off as a man in… show more.

This is an excellent book to read if you are interested in understanding how and why pirates became such infamous figures. I like Cordingly’s book because it is well-researched and extremely accessible for academic and general readers. Unlike many other pirate history book, he discusses how pirates became pop culture icons and the trends that led them to that status.

First published in 1995, this book helped launch a renewed pirate mania among the public that led to, among other things, the wildly successful Pirates of the Caribbean movie franchise. Cordingly is a skilled writer who deftly weaves together a great range of themes surrounding the Golden Age of Piracy, including the way in which pirates are perceived in popular culture. He does a great job of exploding common myths about pirates, and offering an unvarnished view of what pirate life was actually like. Although it is not a narrative history that moves chronologically, it is a fun and easy… show more.