I have a couple of shelves in my library overflowing with books on the history of pirates, and you might think that would be enough ... and you'd be wrong. (Please don't tell my wife, who absolutely believes I have enough!) I'm always on the lookout for some unique angle or esoteric twist on the subject, or a new book by an author whose work I respect ... but sometimes I pick up a more general text just to refresh my knowledge of the basics and find a good resource to recommend to people who are interested in piracy but don't want to devote too much time to their own research.

The Everything Pirates Book, by Barb Karg and Arjean Spaite, is part of a fairly large collection of Everything books on numerous unrelated topics and, as such, the books are intended to be an introduction rather than a comprehensive resource. That said, The Everything Pirates Book is pretty thorough.

I went into this book with fairly low expectations; given the scattershot approach the Everything series takes on diverse subjects, I didn't expect much expertise. (For instance, a quick glance at the Everything page on the Simon & Schuster website shows books in the series ranging from The Everything Ghost Hunting Book, The Everything Guide to Sports Betting and The Everything Guide to Anger Management to The Everything Big Book of Party Games, The Everything Easy French Cookbook and The Everything Jumbo Book of Large-Print Bible Word Searches -- not exactly the place you'd expect to find a serious discourse on the history, culture and society of piracy.) And yet, Karg and Spaite proved me wrong by proving themselves, if not experts on the subject, at least more than competent researchers.

The book is packed to the gills with solid information, from the history of piracy from a global perspective to the biographies of specific pirates, including all the well-known old favorites (such as Blackbeard, Henry Morgan, Anne Bonny, Jean Lafitte, Bartholomew Roberts, William Dampier and Cheng I Sao), as well as a bunch I hadn't heard of before (including Chui-Apoo, David Williams, Nathaniel North, Shap 'Ng Tsai and Gustav Ray).

The book also digs into the shades of meaning that divide pirates from privateers, corsairs and buccaneers, the types of ships favored in the trade (pinnaces, sloops and brigantines, square-riggers and the like), the particulars of seamanship that every pirate had to know, the ports they favored (Tortuga, Port Royal and Madagascar, among others) and the efforts to stamp them out (or, in some cases, profit from their existence). The authors delve into historic resources on pirates, as well as the fictional well of pirate lore in both literature and cinema. They even touch on the jargon they used and the common phrases that have lingered in modern usage, even if their original meanings have been lost.

The book has blurbs of trivia set apart and scattered throughout, categorized by appropriately piratical themes. As the authors explain:

Pieces of Eight are facts about pirates, privateers, buccaneers, corsairs, and all measure of piracy in general. Shiver Me Timbers are terms related to piracy, nautical terms, and pirate phraseology. Scuttlebutts are questions relating to various piratical issues, and Sea Rovers are tidbits about various rogues who sailed the seas.

The last chapters look at contemporary treasure-hunting and archeological endeavors -- such as searching for Captain Kidd's buried treasure and digging into the infamous "money pit" of Oak Island, Nova Scotia, finding the Whydah wreck, Blackbeard's Queen Anne's Revenge and a few lost Spanish treasure galleons, and exploring the flooded city of Port Royal -- as well as the ever-present scourge of modern piracy.

Like I said, I have read extensively on the subject of pirates, and yet I still enjoyed reading The Everything Pirates Book quite a lot. Karg and Spaite offer a lot of good, solid history in an interesting, easy-to-read format, and someone new to the subject will learn quite a lot ... while old salty dogs such as myself will still benefit from the refresher.