I’m reading The Penguin Book of Pirates, which came out last year. Edited by Katherine Howe, who had edited the Penguin Book of Witches that I read a couple of months ago. A collection of period documents covering some two centuries of pirate activity. One interesting thing she points out is that piracy is insepsarable from slavery – the pirates frequently raided slave ships, stole the human cargo, and sold them themselves. After all the recent discussion about how pirate societies were real democracies, founded by men maltreated by the system nd impressed against their will into the service, it sort of brings things back down to earth to realize that they were doing their own form of impressment. Of course, despite the attraction of fictional pirates like Long John Silver, we know that they were a dangerous and lethal lot. But it sort of hits you to think of the dashing Sir Francis Drake as a slave dealer.
You can see where people got their fictional pirates from when you read these. There was a Dread Pirate Mainwaring who might have inspired William Goldman’s Dread Pirate Roberts in The Princess Bride. Besides the title (which might not have been used of Mainwaring in his lifetime), there are similarities in their backstories.
Worth a read. Other books in the series include the Penguin books of Demons, Hell, Dragons, Mermaids, Japanese Short Stories, and others.
On audio I just finished Peter Lamont and Jim Steinmeyer’s The Secret History of Magic. It’s an interesting book, giving the modern history of magic (useful because I’m researching some aspects of this myself right now), but it’s disappointing in that , although they say they’re going to reveal some secrets of magic, they don’t really. They frequently (and rightly) state that people concentrate too much on the methods and hidden secrets and not enough on the performance and how it is displayed. I’ll agree that performance is better than 50% of the show, and a good presentation can make even a mediocre trick appear to be a brilliant miracle. But, when you get down to it, if the performer can’t produce an effect that itself appears to be impossible, all the presentation skill in the world won’t save it. This book could’ve done with a little more explicit description of how the trick is done to illustrate their point, rather than constantly re-iterating that it’s the performance that’s important. If I go on and on about how I’m going to levitate a lady, and pass a hoop around her to prove there are no wires or supports holding her up, that doesn’t even give you a good image of how the illusion appears, let alone explain how the magician “sells” the illusion. They don’t give any of the details, and in magic performances the devil is frequently in the details.
And that particular example of The Levitating Lady is a good example to use. the Secret has been revealed in a number of easily-available sources. Here’s one –
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f6EfpMxqSxY&t=12s
Part of the presentation is precisely how the magician can pass a hoop around her to prove that there’s no support holding her up. It’s one thing to say that he does this, but the wonder of it is precisely how he cab do this when, in fact, there really is a support holding her up. Saying it’s “presentation” doesn’t do justice to the cleverness of the illusion.
Anyway, now it’s on to Astor: The Rise and Fall of an American Fortune by Anderson Cooper.