A Man Most Driven
Captain John Smith, Pocahontas and the Founding of America
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- $10.99
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- $10.99
Publisher Description
He fought and beheaded three Turkish adversaries in duels. He was sold into slavery, then murdered his master to escape. He sailed under a pirate flag, was shipwrecked and marched to the gallows to be hanged, only to be reprieved at the eleventh hour. And all this happened before he was thirty years old. This is Captain John Smith’s life.
Everyone knows the story of Pocahontas, and how in 1607 she saved John Smith. And were it not for Smith’s leadership, the Jamestown colony would surely have failed. Yet Smith was a far more ambitious explorer and soldier of fortune than these tales suggest – and a far more ambitious self-promoter, too. Now, in this first new major biography of Smith in decades, award-winning BBC filmmaker and author Peter Firstbrook traces the adventurer’s astonishing exploits across three continents, testing Smith’s own writings against the historical and geographical reality on the ground.
With A Man Most Driven, Firstbrook delivers a riveting, enlightening dissection of this myth-making man, England’s arrival on the world stage, and the creation of America.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Historian and former BBC producer Firstbrook (The Obamas) delves deep into the early history of America with this thoroughly-researched biography of John Smith, who was instrumental in establishing Jamestown as a permanent English settlement in the early 17th century. With so much of Smith's life known only through his own contradictory writings, Firstbrook approaches the subject with healthy skepticism, examining just where Smith's claims might be exaggerated and where history backs them up. In the process, Firstbrook also takes a closer look at the legend of Pocahontas, at least partially debunking the motives behind her timely intervention in Smith's death sentence, suggesting that the entire episode might have been more performance on Smith's part than he originally made out. Firstbrook's narrative is dry but detail-rich, drawing heavily from Smith's writings to tell the story of a larger-than-life figure with an uncanny knack for survival. He may have been prone to self-aggrandizement but he did, in fact, do most of the things he claimed to do. Firstbrook concludes that "If John Smith has one enduring legacy, it was that he was the first Englishman to understand the great American Dream," and it's clear that Smith's adventurous nature and dogged perseverance certainly left a lasting impression on future generations of Americans.
