Cape Cod [Hardcover]

William Martin (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: 1991

By the bestselling author of Back Bay, this is a majestic multi-gnerational saga that brings to life the story of Cape Cod, from the landing of the Mayflower to the present. From its highly-charged opening to its shattering conclusion, Cape Cod is a novel as impressive and captivating as the land it portrays.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

In a sweeping historical saga packed with history and incident, Martin ( Back Bay ) follows two intertwined yet bitterly antagonistic families from their Pilgrim origins to the present day. On board the Mayflower, sanctimonious church elder Ezra Bigelow and whaler Jack Hilyard, who defies the Pilgrims' rules of piety and obedience, take an immediate and intense dislike to each other. An observant mariner on board ship keeps a detailed log and chronicles a shocking incident that would bring shame and dishonor upon the Bigelow family if it were made known. The log is lost, but its trail gleams like a golden thread through the narrative, and, as the ever-wealthier Bigelows and the rakish Hilyards clash bitterly over the years (particularly over a prime piece of Cape Cod shoreline called Jack's Island that is continually changing hands), the log emerges briefly now and then to inspire blackmail and unease. After Martin's less than reverent look at our Pilgrim forefathers, he packs the narrative with abundant adultery, several massacres, pirateering, slave-trading and rum-running. In the current generation, Geoff Hilyard is trying to save his part of Jack's Island from avaricious Bigelow developers. To stave off financial ruin, he is searching for the elusive Mayflower log, now an enormously valuable historical document. Martin gives Michener a run for his money with this rousing tale. 75,000 first printing; $120,000 ad/promo; Literary Guild and Doubleday Book Club alternates; author tour.
Copyright 1991 Reed Business Information, Inc.

About the Author

Harvard: mention the name and you'll hear about academic excellence and overweening arrogance, about high-minded ambition and Harvard indifference, about pathways to power and people who think that power should be theirs simply because of where they went to college, about "the fellowship of scholars and educated men and women" and "the typical Harvard snob." And if this was a multiple choice test, I'd check all of the above, because Harvard is a place of great contradictions, which create conflict, which creates drama. That's why I decided to write about the place. And I went there, too. And my son goes there now. When he applied, I gave him this bit of advice, drawn from experience: "Some guys never get over the fact that they didn't get into Harvard. And some guys never get over the fact that they did. I don't want you to be either kind." But back when I was a senior at a Catholic high school in Boston, there was nowhere else that I wanted to go, because, quite simply, Harvard was the best you could ask for. That's what we'd heard, anyway. I arrived at Harvard in the fall of 1968. I had been assigned to Thayer Hall, a century-old dormitory in the Yard. It was my introduction to that world of history, tradition, and excellence. I stepped into my room and was greeted by? a three-foot pile of trash. Of all the rooms in all the dormitories in Harvard Yard, mine was the one that they had forgotten to clean. Or so I thought. That evening, my freshman education in the imperfections of even such an august institution as Harvard had begun. It would culminate on an April morning when I stood on the steps of that freshman dormitory and watched phalanxes of police eject student demonstrators from University Hall. It wasn't a tranquil time to go to college, but it wasn't boring, either. And for someone who knew that he wanted to pursue the business of story telling (in my application essay, I had written that I wanted to be like David Lean, the director of Lawrence of Arabia and other Hollywood epics), there was much to be learned of human drama as I watched disputes between students and administration spiral into outright conflict. But it wasn't all politics. Those of us who were not part of the rebellion developed a healthy cynicism about the rebels, the administration, the whole thing. Then we got on with out lives. When my son started at Harvard, I told him that after four years there, he should feel many emotions, and one of them should be exhaustion? from trying to partake of as much as he could at Harvard. The advice was drawn from experience. I majored in English, a good major for someone with my tastes. I directed plays, including "The Taming of the Shrew." I took courses from the so-called "great men" of the faculty like John Kenneth Galbraith, and from future greats like Stephen Jay Gould. I was tear-gassed, through no fault of my own. I worked as a research assistant for visiting history professors. I got food poisoning from an infamous tray of scalloped potatoes in the freshman union. I interviewed movie stars like James Stewart when they came to the Hasty Pudding, then wrote about them in the Harvard Independent. I tutored local kids in the Harvard Upward Bound program. I worked dorm crew and cleaned hundreds of toilets, including the one in Franklin D. Roosevelt's suite. I wrote an honors thesis in English about John Ford, a movie director. And I benefited from Harvard's generous financial aid policies. In the summers, I worked in the Boston construction industry, and I used to say that I learned more about life on a two-foot plank thirteen stories above Boston than I ever did at Harvard, but I don't think that's true. Harvard was more fun, and the place was good to me?. so good, in fact, that when I got married a year after graduation, my wife and I decided to have our reception in the courtyard of Kirkland House, the undergraduate residence where I'd lived. Then my wife and I headed west, t --This text refers to the Mass Market Paperback edition.

Product Details

• Hardcover: 652 pages
• Publisher: Warner Books, Inc. (1991)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0446515108
• ISBN-13: 978-0446515108
• Product Dimensions: 9.1 x 6 x 1.9 inches
• Shipping Weight: 2.8 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.8 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (21 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #99,806 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

In his boyhood, William Martin loved what he later called "big stories on broad canvases." He read the novels of C.S. Forester, Dickens, and western author Will Henry. He sat transfixed by the big movies of the early sixties. So after college he went to Hollywood to try his hand at screenwritng but quickly found that his instincts were better suited to novels. His first, "Back Bay," introduced treasure hunter Peter Fallon in a new kind of adventure that joined the contemporary mystery-thriller to the historical novel. In his nine novels (including four best selling Peter Fallon adventures), Martin has tracked national treasures across the landscape of the American imagination, chronicled the lives of the great and the anonymous in American history, and brought to life legendary American locations, from "Cape Cod" to "Annapolis" to the "City of Dreams." He has also written an award-winning PBS documentary on the life of Washington and a cult-classic horror movie, has contributed book reviews to the Boston Globe, and has taught writing across the country, from the Harvard Extension School to the famous Maui Writers Conference. He lives near Boston with his wife and has three grown children. His work has established him as a "storyteller whose smoothness matches his ambition."(Publisher's Weekly) And he was the recipient of the 2005 New England Book Award, given to "an author whose body of work stands as a significant contribution to the culture of the region."

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

18 of 19 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars America's beginnings, September 10, 1999

By 

Charles Andrews (Fort Worth, TX USA) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Cape Cod (Mass Market Paperback)

Martin brings the plight of the Pilgrims to life. He also manages also to so us once again that these were people and not icons. While fiction, it is easy to visualize the petty argumnets and personality struggles within this group that most of us assume was a cohesive unit with a united purpose. Using his now familiar device of switching back and forth from now and then, Martin paints a living picture of the early history of the Cape. This was the last of Martin's books that I read prior to Citizen Washington. I hesitated because I thought the topic limited but I ended learning and enjoying a compelling history of a special niche in American history.

Martin demonstrates an uncanny ability to tell the great stories (Annapolis - US Navy) a the small (Cape Cod) and make them breathe.

12 of 13 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars CAPE COD.....It ain't just beaches....., November 2, 2002

By 

Jayhawk (Boston, Ma. USA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Cape Cod (Mass Market Paperback)

At least not in William Martin's novel of the same name. In Martin's CAPE COD there are feuding families, long-held secrets, regional history and, tying it all together, a mystery - as well as those wondrous beaches and that natural essence of 'The Cape' (as we New Englanders know and love it) that he brings to life in this story.
From the first pages of this novel, in which whales inexplicably beach themselves, Native Americans and White men clash, and the Pilgrims, noble, flawed and human as they were, suffer the awful indignities of the relentless voyage to the New World, we're off on a William Martin-style adventure. As is his BACK BAY and ANNAPOLIS, the story unfolds through the eyes of (sometimes warring - always interesting) families, and jumps back and forth in time. This enables us to feel the historical events that are going to impact on the modern-day intrigue. I have always liked this about William Martin's stories. This sense of what it was like 'then,' how people felt, how they acted. We get to enjoy a well written tale and learn a thing or three along the way. Martin's respect for, and love of, history is evident throughout CAPE COD, as it is in ANNAPOLIS, BACK BAY and CITIZEN WASHINGTON. And his reverence for 'The Cape' will be evident to every reader, especially we Cape lovers! For us, that's a bonus. To read CAPE COD is to feel, in those pages, that essence of 'TheCape,'that infuses us as soon as we have crossed the Sagamore and the Bourne bridges....CAPE COD is a wonderful story, a lesson in our history, and the kind of enlightening adventure we have come to expect from William Martin. As usual, he delivers! Read this book...Perhaps sitting in a lounge chair on a sunny summer day at the edge of Old Silver Beach...You'll be glad you did....

6 of 6 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Superb tale of a region, March 3, 1999

By 

Steve Clark - See all my reviews

This review is from: Cape Cod (Mass Market Paperback)

As a devout reader of Michener, Rutherford and Jakes, William Martin's Cape Cod is just as good as anything written by those authors. I judge historical novels on how well they capture the 'sense of place' of the region they focus on. I have spent summers in Cape Cod when I was very young and am currently delving into the genealogy of New England families, and for me, Cape Cod really captured the historical and present-day feelings of the land and the people extremely well.