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35 of 37 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Scurvy Doggerel: In Praise of 'The Pirates!', August 5, 2005
This review is from: The Pirates! In an Adventure with Scientists: A Novel (Hardcover)
Oh, to be a pirate captain with a fine luxurious beard,
Spearheadin' an adventure three parts farce and one part weird,
In which Mr. Charles Darwin in a prominent role you'll see,
Amazing all of London with Bobo the Man-panzee.
The evil Bishop of Oxford tries to scupper Darwin's plans,
To show off Bobo's manners, equal to a gentleman's,
This monkey knows which spoon to use, can make a fine cocktail,
So the pirates must assure the Bishop's wicked scheme will fail.
The pirate dressed in green appears, the pirate with the hook,
And the albino pirate cavorts through this funny book,
They live on ham and Cocoa Puffs (and limes to quench their thirsts),
But there's one what dies of scurvy cause he lives on Lime Starbursts.
Oh somewhere folks're reading stuff that's solemn and demure,
But if you've a taste for Python then this book you will prefer,
'Cause nowhere else on God's Green Earth a funnier book you'll see,
What ho, Defoe! Please write some mo'!
'The Pirates!," that's for me!
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9 of 9 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
A great book! Aaargh!, February 23, 2005
This review is from: The Pirates! In an Adventure with Scientists: A Novel (Hardcover)
When they're not belting out a lusty sea shanty or arguing about the best way to prepare ham, there's nothing pirates like more than a rousing adventure. Happily, that's just what's in store for the Pirate Captain and his shipful of variously monikered pirates--the scarf-wearing pirate, the pirate with an accordion, the ill-fated balding archeologist pirate--when they bump into Charles Darwin and his trained monkey Mr. Bobo in the South Pacific. Together, Darwin and the pirates sail off to England to combat the Bishop of Oxford, an evil-mustachioed villain with a diabolical scheme involving the grisly murder of numerous circus-going women. The Pirate Captain may be an unusually gullible scofflaw, and--how to put this nicely--he's not the sharpest cutlass in the drawer, but his peculiar combination of hirsute manliness, keen introspection ("Damn my piratical nature!"), and roguish je ne sais quoi may be just the thing needed to defeat the Oxfordian knave.
Gideon Defoe's exuberant The Pirates! In an Adventure with Scientists purports to be an account set down some 150 years ago by the debonair Pirate Captain himself--so the Captain's note to readers (specifically, negligee-clad, nineteen-year-old readers) on the back of the book alleges. (Careful readers may doubt the account's historicity, though, given its frequent anachronisms--references to Murder, She Wrote, for example, and Cocoa Puffs. I'll leave it to readers to nitpick.) It comes complete with the occasional footnote, some of the entries very odd indeed: "Black looks best on persons who have black in their features (hair, eyes, brows, and lashes), although black can be worn by most people for very dramatic occasions." There is also a handful of helpful questions for discussion in the back of the book. (For example, number seven: "Scientifically speaking, who do you think the tallest pirate in the world is?")
If it's not clear enough by now, Defoe's Pirates is a hilarious read filled with some extremely clever writing. Not for nothing has Monty Python's Eric Idle blurbed it as "destined to become a classic of pirate comic fiction." You'll want to read this one.
Reviewed by Debra Hamel, author of Trying Neaira: The True Story of a Courtesan's Scandalous Life in Ancient Greece
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11 of 12 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Fantastical! Piratical! Anachronistical!, December 24, 2004
This review is from: The Pirates! In an Adventure with Scientists: A Novel (Hardcover)
Part of the fun of reading Gideon Defoe's The Pirates! In An Adventure With Scientists is picking up on the anachronisms that litter the book like dead lubbers. Some are obvious - Post-It Notes - and some are less so - things in the Natural History Museum in London that will be there long past the year the story takes place [brontosaurus wouldn't make it into the Natural History Museum until at least 50 years after the story takes place]. The basic story goes like this - pirates capture Charles Darwin and the crew of the Beagle and they go to London and have an adventure. If the reader has issues with suspension of disbelief, then this slim volume will be tough going. Some knowledge of pirates and the real people in Darwin's cohort are necessary to get a lot of the jokes [Darwin's pet bulldog in the story is named Huxley]. The humor is very British [although understandable on this side of the pond] and very silly. Although they probably won't have a lot of the background necessary to find it funny, this book is safe for young readers, the worst things in it being very mild innuendo and swear words represented by assorted punctuation marks. This is the type of book you can knock off in a couple of hours on a lazy afternoon while sipping rum in the sun. I doubt it will ever be a bestseller [and it didn't win the author the hand of the young lady he was trying to impress], but if you like pirates, Darwin, and have a sense of humor, you should find the book a short and enjoyable read.
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