By Richard Platt
The real history of piracy, all photographs and artifacts, from ancient Greek raiders to the Caribbean buccaneers, for the child who wants the true story behind the legend.
This is the classic DK reference turned on pirates, and it's the true, grown-up history rather than a storybook. Crisp photographs of real weapons, real coins, real flags and ships sit against clean white pages, and the double-page spreads march through the whole subject: the pirates of ancient Greece and Rome, the Viking raiders, the Barbary corsairs, the buccaneers of the Spanish Main, the great names like Blackbeard and Captain Kidd, women pirates like Anne Bonny and Mary Read, how they navigated, what they ate, the Jolly Roger, and how the age of piracy was finally hunted down. It's a book to browse and keep, not to read front to back, and it treats a pirate-mad child as a serious student of the real thing.
For a child whose pirate obsession has outgrown the storybooks, this is the real reward: a serious, browsable reference that answers the questions the picture books skip. Who were the actual pirates? What did their weapons and ships really look like? The photographs and artifacts carry a strong reader who wants precision over plot, and the depth means it gets kept and returned to rather than finished and shelved. It sits at the deep end of this shelf on purpose, the book that meets the true-history end of the fascination.