Bandits at Sea: A Pirates Reader

With titles like ""Black Men Under the Black Flag"" and ""The Practice of Homosexuality Among the Pirates of China,"" the 16 scholarly essays of Bandits at Sea: A Pirates Reader deliberately set out to explode myths and stereotypes. C.R. Pennell (Morocco Since 1930), senior lecturer at Australia's university of Melbourne, has gathered foremost experts on these most romanticized of murderous predators, some of whom are shown to have had sophisticated anti-statist and class conscious ideas about what they were doing. ( July 2)