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Bezig met laden... The Dragons of the Stormdoor George Robert Minkoff
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Captain John Smith was the first tragic hero in American history. . . and the most maligned, caricatured, and misunderstood. His name is nearly synonymous with Jamestown, the first successful English colony, but his story is also one of power and wealth wielded an ocean away by London aristocrats, explorers, and alchemists, and it signals a clash of cultures, races, classes and beliefs. "The Dragons of the Storm" follows directly from the first volume of the In the Land of Whispers trilogy, "The Weight of Smoke." While the old alchemist and mariner, Jonas Profit, relates the tales of Queen Elizabeth's pirate, Francis Drake ? whose circumnavigation of the world, and sinking of the Spanish Armada, enabled the English to envision a colonial empire ? Council President Smith directs the surviving colonists toward a new society. . . until his authority is stripped from him by his enemies, and he is forced at last to search out the legacies of Drake, Powhatan, and Roanoke. Geen bibliotheekbeschrijvingen gevonden. |
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Google Books — Bezig met laden... GenresDewey Decimale Classificatie (DDC)813.6Literature English (North America) American fiction 21st CenturyLC-classificatieWaarderingGemiddelde:
Ben jij dit?Word een LibraryThing Auteur. McPherson & CompanyEen editie van dit boek werd gepubliceerd door McPherson & Company. |
The three volumes cover the years 1607-1630, with most of the attention focused on the first few years of the settlement at Jamestown (the narrator throughout being Captain John Smith himself). But Minkoff manages to work in tales of earlier times, in the form of stories told to the Jamestown settlers by grizzled alchemist-mariner Jonas Profit, who sailed with Drake in the 1570s and 1580s. In the third volume, when Smith is in exile from Jamestown, it is letters from his friend George Sandys (the colony's treasurer) through which we learn the goings-on back in Virginia.
Minkoff captures quite well the roiling tensions between the Jamestown "gentlemen" who wanted nothing to do with the hard work of creating a colony in Virginia, the laborers who they expected to do said work, and the native people who the colonists relied on for survival (while simultaneously mistrusting deeply). Smith's own writing and publication efforts are an important part of the later volumes, as are his post-Jamestown travels to New England and his concerns over the rise of tobacco culture at Jamestown (not to mention the strong thread running throughout of his disputes with the colony's leaders over general strategy).
Carefully composed, in prose almost lyrical in its rhythms, Minkoff's series is one to be read and enjoyed slowly. While at times the language seems a bit overdone, in general it's simply a pleasure to revel in the complex narrative structure and lose oneself in the days of Hakluyt and Shakespeare.
http://philobiblos.blogspot.com/2012/09/book-review-in-land-of-whispers.html ( )