Wake of the Perdido Star
Written by Gene Hackman and Daniel Lenihan
Narrated by James Daniels
4/5
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About this audiobook
Jack O' Reilly is a 17-year-old New Englander who in 1805, sails with his parents on the Perdido Star to Cuba, his mother's birthplace, to claim the land she inherited. But for Jack, the trip that began with high hopes and the excitement of a new life, becomes a descent into violence and revenge. His parents murdered, their land confiscated, his own life nearly taken, Jack is forced to rejoin the Star as a member of the crew, sailing through the world's most treacherous waters under a drink-crazed captain.
His soul seared and his heart calloused, his obsession to get back to the killer of his parents dominates his life. And so the boy Jackson O'Reilly becomes the pirate "Black Jack," the relentless scourge of any who stand in his path to retribution, until a daring recue of two of his mates teaches him that there are other emotions then anger, other feelings then hatred and mistrust.
Gene Hackman
Gene Hackman is the author of two novels and coauthor of three other novels. He is a two-time Academy Award–winning actor with lauded performances in such films as Unforgiven, Bonnie and Clyde, The French Connection, Mississippi Burning, and The Poseidon Adventure, among others. He lives in Santa Fe, New Mexico, with his wife and two German shepherds.
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Reviews for Wake of the Perdido Star
3 ratings1 review
- Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5I picked up this book because I’d seen it mentioned as a “swashbuckling sea adventure” with plenty of action and piracy.
However, reading it, I was reminded that when I was a kid I went through a big phase of reading lots of historical nautical books, both fiction and non-fiction. (There were lots of sailors and sea voyages in my family history, which is where the interest stemmed from… check out THIS BOOK, it features my distant relative getting cannibalized…) So, although I don’t know HOW to sail or anything like that, I feel that I’ve got a pretty good concept of what life was like on a 19th-century sailing ship. And, in this book, I just wasn’t feeling it. I didn’t notice many inaccuracies (other than that I found it hard to believe that on a ship of 26 hands, there would be sailors that ‘didn’t know each other’ after any amount of voyaging…) but I just wanted more details of shipboard life… but, this is a book that doesn’t get bogged down in details or verisimilitude… it actually, I think, would make a very good movie – and I’m sure that must have been in Gene Hackman’s mind when he was working on it. It’s got just about the level of depth and characterization of your average big-budget movie, with plenty of action scenes, local color and exotic locations (all politically-corrected, to a certain degree.)
The story has to do with a young man who takes to the sea after his parents are murdered by a Cuban Count who seizes the family property. He makes friends with another young man, a victim of shipwreck, and together they have seagoing adventures, as he waits for his chance to take revenge… The checklist of Things That Happen At Sea occurs, fairly predictably – the standout scenes are diving scenes, which (considering that Lenihan is a deep-sea diving expert) seem technically very believable, if contextually very unlikely.