Ahoy, me hearties! Sept. 19 is Talk Like a Pirate Day — Aaaarrrrgggghhhh! Here is your chance to be a real buccaneer, or, at least pretend to be one. Even a landlubber like me can talk like an old salt as long as I have a wee bit of pirate vocabulary under me pirate hat. Shiver me timbers!
I suppose a little pirate talk goes a long way, so let me move on to this week’s recommended reads. You’ll find a handful of pirate-themed titles for kids and adults because interest in pirates has no age limit. What I know about pirates comes mostly from the movies, “Pirates of the Caribbean” and “Peter Pan” in particular. But reading books about real pirates has been quite enlightening (and just so you know, there was a lot more danger and death than “Yo, Ho, Hos!” and bottles of rum). If it’s a spoiler alert to say that pirate life was hard, my apologies.
Adults:
- “Black Flags, Blue Waters: The Epic History of America’s Most Notorious Pirates” by Eric Jay Dolin.
- “Pirates of Barbary: Corsairs, Conquests, and Captivity in the Seventeenth-Century Mediterranean” by Adrian Tinniswood.
- “The Pirate’s Wife: The Remarkable True Story of Sarah Kidd” by Daphne Palmer Geanacopoulos.
Children:
- “Pirate Queens: Dauntless Women Who Dared to Rule the High Seas” written by Leigh Lewis, illustrated by Sara Gomez Woolley.
- “Pirate Ship Adventure Crafts” by Anna Llimos Plomer.
- “Pirates and Shipwrecks: Real Tales of Terror on the High Seas” by Tom McCarthy.
