Book Reviews
Jul. 4th, 2008 05:20 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
clarentineCatching up on my reading.
Druett, Joan: She Captains: Heroines and Hellions of the Sea. As might be expected, I'm mostly reading for what might be said of the people depicted in my work in progress, Satisfaction, but there's other good stuff here--this is a good account of the ways in which women participated in various sea trades and otherwise supported their families and their husbands. My favorite quote: "To put it baldly, Anne Bonny was a camp follower, while Mary Read, a much more complicated person, was a transvestite seaman-soldier." This book felt a little thin, information-wise, and I skipped entire chapters.
Druett, Joan: Rough Medicine: Surgeons at Sea in the Age of Sail. A more detailed book that the foregoing, with a lot of information that I hadn't bumped up against in the rest of my research for Satisfaction, so note-taking was time well spent. It was also engrossing enough that I found myself taking notes crouched over the book on the bus. Druett made ample and wonderful use of journals kept by actual whalers' surgeons (which limits the information's use somewhat for my purposes, as Josh's ships are not whalers, but I can draw parallels and Druett does some of that, too). Favorite quote, this time taken out of Josiah Smollett's semiautobiographical novel The Adventures of Roderick Random, describing bread where "every biscuit whereof, like a piece of clockwork, moved by its own internal impulse, occasioned by the myriads of insects that dwelt within." Ick. Also noteworthy for the appendix lists comparing the surgeon's sea chest of medicines used by father of sea surgery John Woodall in 1637 and by a whaler's surgeon in 1807.
One of my biggest complaints about these two books is that Druett does not annotate her sources. Perhaps I'm spoiled by Marcus Rediker, but in this case it's something I'd very much appreciate, especially since I'm using the information as support for historical fiction and it would be nice to know what is likely true reportage and what is interpretation.
Next up: Rediker's Many Headed Hydra. God bless InterLibrary Loan!
Druett, Joan: She Captains: Heroines and Hellions of the Sea. As might be expected, I'm mostly reading for what might be said of the people depicted in my work in progress, Satisfaction, but there's other good stuff here--this is a good account of the ways in which women participated in various sea trades and otherwise supported their families and their husbands. My favorite quote: "To put it baldly, Anne Bonny was a camp follower, while Mary Read, a much more complicated person, was a transvestite seaman-soldier." This book felt a little thin, information-wise, and I skipped entire chapters.
Druett, Joan: Rough Medicine: Surgeons at Sea in the Age of Sail. A more detailed book that the foregoing, with a lot of information that I hadn't bumped up against in the rest of my research for Satisfaction, so note-taking was time well spent. It was also engrossing enough that I found myself taking notes crouched over the book on the bus. Druett made ample and wonderful use of journals kept by actual whalers' surgeons (which limits the information's use somewhat for my purposes, as Josh's ships are not whalers, but I can draw parallels and Druett does some of that, too). Favorite quote, this time taken out of Josiah Smollett's semiautobiographical novel The Adventures of Roderick Random, describing bread where "every biscuit whereof, like a piece of clockwork, moved by its own internal impulse, occasioned by the myriads of insects that dwelt within." Ick. Also noteworthy for the appendix lists comparing the surgeon's sea chest of medicines used by father of sea surgery John Woodall in 1637 and by a whaler's surgeon in 1807.
One of my biggest complaints about these two books is that Druett does not annotate her sources. Perhaps I'm spoiled by Marcus Rediker, but in this case it's something I'd very much appreciate, especially since I'm using the information as support for historical fiction and it would be nice to know what is likely true reportage and what is interpretation.
Next up: Rediker's Many Headed Hydra. God bless InterLibrary Loan!
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Date: 2008-07-04 10:01 pm (UTC)I heard of a book recently, Seafaring Women? Amazon tells me it is by Linda Grant de Pauw. Supposedly, it is better than the Druett, but having read neither, I know not.
(You may perhaps be amused to hear that my brain has given me an idea for an apocalypse tallships novel. It can go to the back of the queue.)