Book Review: Captain Blood by Rafael Sabatini (Four Stars)

Book Review: Captain Blood by Rafael Sabatini

(Four Stars)

“Why, what’s to fear?” he said. “It’s a Christian country, this, and Christian men do not make war upon the wounded, nor upon those who harbour them.” He still had, you see, illusions about Christians.

Enjoyable old-fashioned sea opera. Better, if more simply, developed than many more modern adventure novels. Written in 1922, Captain Blood spawned a generation of swashbuckling copies and movies.

“The wise thing’d be to hang him

Book Review: Allan Quartermain by H. Rider Haggard (Three Stars)

Book Review: Allan Quartermain by H. Rider Haggard

(Three Stars)

“A hundred thousand spears shall sparkle in my train like star glimmering down.”

A lost world adventure. Later nineteenth century equivalent of contemporary science-fiction, fantasy adventure story. In 1887 it was plausible that a country “the size of France” could be hidden—and isolated—in central Africa, but then we accepted that Asia could hide a mythical Himalayan utopia in 1933.

“I say that as the savage is, so is the white man, only the latter is more inventive, and possesses the faculty of combination; save and except also that the savage, as I have known him, is to a large extent free from the greed of money, which eats like a cancer into the heart of the white man.”

Reflects the racial and sexist idioms of the day, but surprisingly