ALL I SEE IS VIOLENCE, a novel whose title is evocative and accurate and deeply sad

ALL I SEE IS VIOLENCE
ANGIE ELITA NEWELL
Greenleaf Book Group Press
$27.95 hardcover, available now

Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: A woman warrior, a ruthless general, and a single mother―three stories deftly braided into the legacy of a stolen nation

The US government stole the Black Hills from the Sioux, as it stole land from every tribe across North America. Forcibly relocated, American Indians were enslaved under strict land and resource regulations. Indigenous writer Angie Elita Newell brings a poignant retelling of the catastrophic, true story of the 1876 Battle of Little Bighorn and the social upheaval that occurred on the Pine Ridge Reservation in 1972 during the height of the American Indian Movement.

Cheyenne warrior Little Wolf fights to maintain her people’s land and heritage as General Custer leads a devastating campaign against American Indians, killing anyone who refuses to relocate to the Red Cloud Agency in South Dakota. A century later, on that same reservation, Little Wolf’s relation Nancy Swiftfox raises four boys with the help of her father-in-law, while facing the economic and social ramifications of this violent legacy.

All I See Is Violence weaves love, loss, and hard truths into a story that needs to be told―a journey through violence to bear witness to all that was taken, to honor what all of our ancestors lived through, and to heal by acknowledging the shadows in order to find the light.

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My Review: Alternating PoV narratives are hard to pull off. A balancing act among three voices is even harder. What Author Newell sought to do, it seems to me, was done by giving the reader all the points of view that shore up her point: Fight for or against something, whichver you like, and you will still end up reinforcing the violence and the rage our world is swimming in. She does this best by presenting each character's story to us in the same first-person present tense.

To be sure, her Indigenous people's points of view are clearly presented as they are, the victims of an aggressive colonial project that requires them to die. The truth here is that women are not passive victims of this project, but use every tool available at the time they exist to fight against the dual prongs of racism and sexism.

Custer's PoV is, at first, an odd choice given the theme of the book. His perpetration of violence against Indigenous people did nor give me any clues about why he was included...until his (much shorter) sections led me to see that the story was about the violence committed, not about victimhood. Custer was part of an Imperial project, and a believer in it...through cluelessness, sociopathy, or an Eichmannesque just-following-orders soldier's ethos is an open question.

I landed on a four-star rating because I was not entirely convinced by the narrative inclusion of Custer...it jars with my expectations, and more to the point it is not prefigured or required in Little Wolf's contemporaneous narrative parts...and because I very much wanted more of Nancy Littlefox's family relationships. These lacunae were not fatal to my enjoyment of the read, obviously, but noticeably lessened my smooth sailing through it.

Cavils, really, concerning a read I was drawn to, and held within, for several pleasurable hours.

POOR DEER, second novel by Claire Oshetsky of CHOUETTE fame

POOR DEER
CLAIRE OSHETSKY
Ecco(Bookshop.org link)
$16.99 trade paper, available now

Rating: 5* of five

The Publisher Says: A wondrous, tender novel about a young girl grappling with her role in a tragic loss—and attempting to reshape the narrative of her life—from PEN/Faulkner Award nominee Claire Oshetsky

Margaret Murphy is a weaver of fantastic tales, growing up in a world where the truth is too much for one little girl to endure. Her first memory is of the day her friend Agnes died.

No one blames Margaret. Not in so many words. Her mother insists to everyone who will listen that her daughter never even left the house that day. Left alone to make sense of tragedy, Margaret wills herself to forget these unbearable memories, replacing them with imagined stories full of faith and magic—that always end happily.

Enter Poor Deer: a strange and formidable creature who winds her way uninvited into Margaret’s made-up tales. Poor Deer will not rest until Margaret faces the truth about her past and atones for her role in Agnes’s death.

Heartrending, hopeful, and boldly imagined, Poor Deer explores the journey toward understanding the children we once were and the stories we tell ourselves to make sense of life’s most difficult moments.

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My Review: What dies when a child dies? A parent dies thousands of deaths while their child is alive: fear, worry, the desperate pride in the pain that they suffer because of the child’s process of individuation from the Terrible Twos to *shudder* adolescence, or the death of a thousand cuts as I describe it; the death of the child is, however, the absence of these once-suffered pains, now become the hideous trackless void of grief. Many, maybe most, suffering parents turn to some sort of formal ritualized observance. The difference is of kind, not sort. Whether they choose religious, or secular, fellowship they seek comfort based in groups that cater for the vast needs of those grieving. But the dead child’s peers, lacking the perspective of adults, do not have the same outlets for their intense and passionate feelings.

Margaret, after the death of her best friend and neighbor Ruby, has developed versions of many of these coping behaviors: chanting, counting, seeking and seeing omens. Her mother makes the error common to many parents of her station and low educational attainment, using threats and bullying to keep Margaret in line. The result is predictable to the reader.

Margaret uses fantasy to put her feelings into tolerable emotional perspective. Her world is made up of adults who strive...I’d say "struggle" but they would never agree to such a freighted negative term...just to make some semblance of a life. Thus they, and Margaret, are always under tremendous stresses from many angles. The usual suspect for their adult coping mechanism in this kind of toxic soup is some religious and/or spiritual system, either mainstream or off the beaten path. Margaret’s mother and aunt, with whom she lives in their childhood home, are of the very old-fashioned Old Testament christian believers ilk. Her own coping mechanism is, as expected, in alignment with that kind of belief system, though its substance is not christian looking.

Given all the above, it makes sense that Margaret makes her grief, guilt...what religious system works without guilt?...and shame into an entity that judges and abuses her. That it was Poor Deer, an animal spirit named with the often overheard characterization of Margaret that she reimagines, was inspired. Different in affect, the same in effect. All of it was hard for my similarly afflicted self to read. Did Margaret cause her best friend Ruby’s death? contribute to it? or is Margaret simply a child whose always turbulent emotional world has been completely upended by a tragedy she has no framework to process, to get any kind of handle on? Since we meet Margaret and Poor Deer, that animal spirit aforementioned, as the latter has finally bullied the former into writing a confession of her guilt...for what? I wondered what can a child really be held resonsible for?...we are never on solid narrative ground.

I contend we never get there. This is, for me as a reader, a feature not a bug.

Margaret is an unusually bright person. Her coping mechanisms all fill the places that more intelligent, more emotionally adept parent figures...no father anywhere to be seen...would have resulted in her finding a direction forward into her life, instead of circling endlessly the disfiguring self-doubt and suspicion she swims through daily. Margaret creates, or finds, or discovers Poor Deer to fulfil the role of cicerone, mentor, and conscience.

Poor Deer is a story. All of us live out stories. Margaret has built her own world of stories because she can control them, can make sense of them, can mold them into the kind of purposeful, positive paths that she has so sorely lacked. So is this a story about how awful a childhood this one girl has led? Are we expected to follow this path from tragedy to mental illness then just...go on about our day?

If you haven’t read Chouette, you might wonder. Author Claire does not Do pointless suffering. Suffering you will do. There is, in fact, a Point. That we come to the end of the story in a manner not wholly predictable is just the expected way Author Claire works. That we come to the end of Margaret’s childhood without the sense of being smothered in a bow tied around our readerly eyes as we face the firing squad of Predictability’s story soldiers is vintage Author Claire.

Does childhood end? Do we wake up one fine day all adulty and fully prepared for life? Are you kidding? Margaret doesn’t do that either, she slugs it out with demons internal and external, and Margaret...becomes Margaret. You are investing in the journey into selfhood of a person who survives her life and becomes herself. It is a journey that never, ever grows less important or less lonely. Going with Margaret, whose beginnings reminded me a great deal of my own, on her trip through the story she and Poor Deer massage into ever evolving shapes and sizes as needed, left me very rough at the end of the book.

The spots I have polished into a high gloss by reinventing the stories I needed to survive got sanded down to the original story. Like Margaret, I didn’t grow up, I grew larger by reinvention. That process, once begun in survival mode, does not...can not...end.

All five stars.

BLACK DIAMOND QUEENS: African American Women and Rock and Roll, another co-opted cultural theft from Black folks

BLACK DIAMOND QUEENS: African American Women and Rock and Roll
MAUREEN MAHON
Duke University Press
$30.95 trade paper, available now

Rating: 5* of five

The Publisher Says: African American women have played a pivotal part in rock and roll—from laying its foundations and singing chart-topping hits to influencing some of the genre's most iconic acts. Despite this, black women's importance to the music's history has been diminished by narratives of rock as a mostly white male enterprise.

In Black Diamond Queens, Maureen Mahon draws on recordings, press coverage, archival materials, and interviews to document the history of African American women in rock and roll between the 1950s and the 1980s. Mahon details the musical contributions and cultural impact of Big Mama Thornton, LaVern Baker, Betty Davis, Tina Turner, Merry Clayton, Labelle, the Shirelles, and others, demonstrating how dominant views of gender, race, sexuality, and genre affected their careers.

By uncovering this hidden history of black women in rock and roll, Mahon reveals a powerful sonic legacy that continues to reverberate into the twenty-first century.

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My Review: Get your pearl-clutching hand limbered up, y’all...white men grabbed a narrative and co-opted it again!
I know, I know...no one saw that coming, did they?

What I did not know about the history of women in rock and roll was a LOT. The underhanded way the gatekeepers would routinely mislabel Black women's music as soul or R&B, making it into an audience-awareness choice, reaching the natural market for these women's work, ie other Black folks. This made sure it all looked okay from the outside and still kept them separate from the white audiences that loved their music. Big Mama Thornton recorded major hits for white artists who got them from discovering her versions, eg Elvis re-recording "Hound Dog" after she did it, then refusing ever to acknowledge her as the source of the style and the rendition he made. She never got her public due, her deserved attention, or her merited rewards despite a many-decade career.

There is an entire chapter on the girl groups like the Shirelles and the Supremes, huge cultural forces in their day and now largely ignored or forgotten entirely. Diana Ross might be familiar to some younger folk (likely as a solo act), but neither Florence Ballard nor Mary Wilson are, and that is nigh on criminal neglect! The history of the women who worked behind the stars, and in the session studios, are equally unknown to the broad swath of listeners. Who knows who Merry Clayton is, by name anyway? But listen to the Rolling Stones' absolutely ubiquitous "Gimme Shelter" and they know that voice. An actual human woman, with a career, made those glorious sounds behind Jagger's howl of lust. Women like Claudia Lennear and Minnie Riperton were "muses" for white, famous men, and had tiny fractions of their success.

Of course no one can take a cursory look at this book and fail to see Tina Turner front and center. Rightly so. Her life and career were legendary from the beginning. Every action, every concert, was An Event. A life lived in the glare of publicity, though, is not always a career that works for the aritst. While Tina Turner did find justly given adulation and success for her talents, she worked for everything she ever got *against* the men resisting her input and rejecting her needs and wants. It was not until the 1980s, her fourth decade as a singer, that she finally shed the R&B ghettoization and became a megastar. The fact is that Tina Turner was a musical force of nature, and should have been lionized with the greatest of the British white men who gave the US white audiences covers of the Black women's originals.

I think I learned most from Author Mahon's chapter on Betty Davis, one of Miles Davis' wives. Her astonishing music was a YouTube rathole I had not known existed. Listen to "If I'm In Luck I Might Get Picked Up" and tell me you don't feel deprived that you are hearing it for the first time in the 21st century. That is my—our—loss, and a bitter privation indeed. It slammed home the grotesque waste of Black women's talents and gifts this book was written to highlight.

For this MLK Day of reviews, this read was both fascinating and infuriating. The misogyny, the racism, the sheer hideous waste of so much life force, all left me more hell bent than ever to seek voices, experiences, and talents in as many corners that are not spotlit than ever. Join me and let's start shoutin’ about it.

JOHN LEWIS: In Search of the Beloved Community, a "Citty Upon a Hill" longed from since the time of Winthrop

JOHN LEWIS: In Search of the Beloved Community
RAYMOND ARSENAULT
Yale University Press
$35.00 hardcover, available tomorrow

Rating: 5* of five

The Publisher Says: The first full-length biography of civil rights hero and congressman John Lewis

For six decades John Robert Lewis (1940–2020) was a towering figure in the U.S. struggle for civil rights. As an activist and progressive congressman, he was renowned for his unshakable integrity, indomitable courage, and determination to get into “good trouble.”

In this first book-length biography of Lewis, Raymond Arsenault traces Lewis’s upbringing in rural Alabama, his activism as a Freedom Rider and leader of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, his championing of voting rights and anti-poverty initiatives, and his decades of service as the “conscience of Congress.”

Both in the streets and in Congress, Lewis promoted a philosophy of nonviolence to bring about change. He helped the Reverend Martin Luther King Jr. and other civil rights leaders plan the 1963 March on Washington, where he spoke at the Lincoln Memorial. Lewis’s activism led to repeated arrests and beatings, most notably when he suffered a skull fracture in Selma, Alabama, during the 1965 police attack later known as Bloody Sunday. He was instrumental in the passage of the Voting Rights Act of 1965, and in Congress he advocated for racial and economic justice, immigration reform, LGBTQ rights, and national health care.

Arsenault recounts Lewis’s lifetime of work toward one overarching realizing the “beloved community,” an ideal society based in equity and inclusion. Lewis never wavered in this pursuit, and even in death his influence endures, inspiring mobilization and resistance in the fight for social justice.

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My Review: Almost six hundred pages. That is a lot of reading time. It is also, peculiarly enough, less than I would have liked it to be because the life of Representative Lewis took place in such interesting times, and among such towering figures of US history, that I would gladly have read more.

Most all my readers know I am a committed atheist, and either know or can guess why. It is people like John Lewis, who used their christian beliefs to leave the world a better, more equitable place for as many as he could advocate for, that make me especially bitter about the sleazy rotten souled creeps who embody my idea of christians and christianity. Lewis was such a committed christian that he, the victim of a violent attack by a racist who later regretted his actions and sought forgiveness from Lewis, referred to the man as his brother in a television appearance they made together. This is a prime example of what a friend of Lewis’s called his "moral jujitsu," a means of wrong-footing the hate-spewing opponents who confidently expected him to return fire.

Author Arsenault sites Lewis in his historical milieu with thorough, fully attributed research. He has relied on personal sources who knew him. Thus they, who were there, can give him the real flavor of a Jim Crow rural Alabama upbringing, one filled with the ritual humiliations and deprivations so beloved of our scumbag brethren the white nationalists. While this did radicalize young Lewis, his christian beliefs channeled his radicalism into a serach for justice, fairness, equitability, and all achieved without the rage and hate that marked his opponents. Admirable to me, and to generations of voters who returned him to Congress for much of his adult life.

His skills as a politician were honed in the arena of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, which he was instrumental in forming and from whom he broke away after they began calling for "Black Power," which he saw as provocative and counterproductive with its inherent message of conflict. Lewis opposed the simple reductive sloganeering of the Civil Rights Movement in its post-MLK era. This was, after all, one of the folk who thought they would be murdered in public on Bloody Sunday, in a protest on a bridge now named after him.

What that pointed to was a fact that I, no scholar of Representative Lewis’s life and career, had never known or even considered: John Lewis was not uniformly admired among his colleagues because he favored the cause of human rights over narrowly construed civil rights. He was, for example, taken to task for his vocal opposition to the confirmation of the Supreme Court’s first Black justice, Clarence Thomas...and how right he was about that! He was also a QUILTBAG ally in a community that does not, as a rule, support gay rights...at least not publicly. He very much did, and also supported the ongoing Jewish struggle against antisemitism.

John Lewis emerges from this telling of his life’s story as a man of high principles and powerful moral certainty. It did not make him universally loved, in fact made him a figure of hatred for many, but it gave him the grace of convictions not merely held, but lived. I hope you will spend some hours with John Lewis’s spirit by reading Author Arsennault’s wonderful telling of it. There are illustrative images in the text that enrich the older reader’s memory of the times he helped shape. It is a life worth knowing more about lived in times we still feel reverberations of...though not as positive a feedback as I myownself would prefer.

ACTIVATING THE COMMON GOOD: Reclaiming Control of Our Collective Well-Being, a goal more important than ever

ACTIVATING THE COMMON GOOD: Reclaiming Control of Our Collective Well-Being
PETER BLOCK
Berrett-Koehler Publishers
$27.95 hardcover, available now

Rating: 5* of five

The Publisher Says: A powerful, inspiring, and achievable vision of a society based on cooperation and community instead of competition and commodification.

This book counters the dominant and destructive story that we are polarized, violent, selfish, and destined to consume everything in sight. That is not who we are.

The challenge, Peter Block says, is that we are suffering under an economic theology that is based on scarcity, self-interest, competition, and infinite growth. We’re told we can purchase and outsource all that matters. Block calls this the “business perspective narrative.” It dominates not only the economy but also architecture, faith communities, journalism, arts, neighborhoods, and much more.

Block offers an alternative in the “common good narrative.” It embodies the belief that we are basically communal and cooperative. And that we have the capacity to communally produce what we care most raising a child, safety, livelihood, health, and a clean and sustainable environment.

This book describes how shifts to the common good perspective could transform many areas, fostering journalism that reports on what works, architecture that designs habitable spaces creating connection, faith collectives that build community, a market that is restrained and local, and leadership and activism that build social capital by creating trust among citizens. With these shifts, we would fundamentally change the world we live in for the better.

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My Review: A business guru wrote this book, this loud call to rein in our enshrined attitude of greed and selfishness. That delights me more than anything else about the read. I resonate like a struck bell to the author’s call to rethink our cultural norms. Given how entrenched the mindset of me first, me on top is, the best thing to do is to begin the process of change at the personal and local level.

Visit the website, The Abundant Community, that the author and his collaborator John McKnight run. It is chock-a-block with ideas and resources to accomplish this. The book at hand is an excellent read to guide you to the areas that you most need to focus on, be they personal or community based. Our individual well-being is tied closely to our social well-being and this is a frequently discussed facet of life that the author is at pains to weave throughout the short book. From the Introduction, entitled “We Are Not Divided”, forward, Author Block makes the case for beginning one’s journey with the personal commitment to calibrating one’s mind to a "we are not alone" mindset. The difference between "alone" and "divided" recurs throughout the book, very much ringing through the ideas for actions we as citizens of this system of divide-and-conquer tactics can effectively take.

There is nothing at all unattainable in any of the goals Author Block offers to us as models for effecting change. That he offers them in actionable formats and in digestible, relatable examples makes the read both pleasant, easy, and short and offers real-world results to those willing to undertake his tried-and-tested steps toward a common-good focused world.

DOMESTIC DARKNESS An Insider's Account of the January 6th Insurrection, and the Future of Right-Wing Extremism, URGENT READING!

DOMESTIC DARKNESS: An Insider's Account of the January 6th Insurrection, and the Future of Right-Wing Extremism
JULIE FARNAM
Ig Publishing
$27.95 hardcover, available now

Rating: 4.5* of five

The Publisher Says: After being named Assistant Director of Intelligence for the Capitol Police just days before the 2020 election, Julie Farnam warned its leadership of the upcoming insurrection, sharing that “Congress itself is the target on the 6th.” Tragically, her warnings were ignored.

Domestic Darkness takes us inside the explosive events of January 6, 2021, revealing how the Capitol Police disregarded intelligence about the right-wing extremists who would seize the capitol on that fateful day. In addition to offering a harrowing view of what it was like on the ground, watching the violence unfold and knowing it could have been prevented, Domestic Darkness also examines the specific groups and ideologies, such as the Oath Keepers, Proud Boys, QAnon, and white supremacists, who were central to the events of January 6th and who, emboldened by Trump and other right-wing leaders, continue to be a threat to our democracy.

The book will also explore what happened within the Capitol Police in the wake of the insurrection, and how to address future dangers from domestic terrorism. With the 2024 presidential election just around the corner, we need to look at the lessons January 6th taught us to ensure something like that never happens again.

Julie Farnam served as the Assistant and then Acting Director of Intelligence for the United States Capitol Police during one of the most tumultuous periods in this country’s history. During her time there, she oversaw the identification and vetting of nearly 20,000 threats against members of Congress, most of which were made by U.S. citizens who adhered to extremist ideologies.

Prior to joining the Capitol Police, Farnam served with the Department of Homeland Security for over fifteen years.

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA EDELWEISS+. THANK YOU.

My Review: Oh gawd, I hear y’all thinking, he’s off again, ranting about the MAGATs and their scum of a leader.

Yep. Sit down and eat your literary spinach. This is Important.

I will avoid the book report part of the read because 1. I hate doing it, b. I want to, iii. the details that Author Farnam presents made me sick to my stomach to read. That US citizens could be radicalized in this vile, scumbaggy way is a shock to my sensibilities, though in no way a surprise. I did, after all, grow up in Texas.

What I *will* discuss is the scariest, most infuriating bit of the story (to this reader, anyway)...the misogyny and unaccountability of the US Capitol Police. They dismissed a fifteen-year intelligence professional's substantiated warnings because she is a woman...they didn't have to give information to any other agencies because the Legislative Branch for whom they work is exempt from the Freedom of Information Act...they had the usual Police Department attitude towards those outside of mild contempt and utter disrespect. This is someone who came from the inside, and they treated her like she was a tourist who happened to find an unoccupied desk.

Why I want you to read it is simple: Author Farnam names names. There were those inside the US Capitol that bad, horrifying January day in 2021 who very carefully did nothing. She knows who, and makes a decent case for why. This is, by itself, worth the cost of the book. The manner in which the author makes her case for what to do with that information is a model of clarity and convincing authority. Her commonsensical call for this very important law enforcement agency to work collegially with other parts of the huge security apparatus the US is hagridden by seems modest enough, given the events of January 6, 2021. Her additional, very well founded calls for the US law enforcement establishment to expand its definitions of, and penalties for, terrorism of domestic origin are music to my cop unfriendly ears. This is a major problem and it will not go away if we just ignore it.

One of the most frustrating bits of the read was the realization that Author Farnam handed her critics a big cudgel to bludgeon her with: She had an intimate relationship with a man inside the department who, it later transpired, was feeding insider knowledge to the insurrectionists. This is in the end, however, one of the most important pluses of the read. She is upfront about it, she makes no bones about his fate of being Federally indicted for his role being just and proper, and thus assures us...possibly convinces those on the MAGAt side, too...that she speaks with real, sincere awareness of the many facets of the problems she delineates and offers solutions for.

There is no louder voice than the one from inside the house. This book amplifies that voice for us all to hear...and I very much hope heed as well.

MUTINY ON THE RISING SUN: A Tragic Tale of Slavery, Smuggling, and Chocolate, what happens when greed is unbound

MUTINY ON THE RISING SUN: A Tragic Tale of Slavery, Smuggling, and Chocolate
JARED ROSS HARDESTY
NYU Press
$28.00 hardcover, available now; $20.00 trade paper, available in April

Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: On the night of June 1, 1743, terror struck the schooner Rising Sun. After completing a routine smuggling voyage where the crew sold enslaved Africans in exchange for chocolate, sugar, and coffee in the Dutch colony of Suriname, the ship traveled eastward along the South American coast.

Believing there was an opportunity to steal the lucrative cargo and make a new life for themselves, three sailors snuck below deck, murdered four people, and seized control of the vessel. Mutiny on the Rising Sun recounts the origins, events, and eventual fate of the Rising Sun's final smuggling voyage in vivid detail.

Starting from that night in June 1743, it narrates a history of smuggling, providing an incredible story of those caught in the webs spun by illicit commerce. The case generated a rich documentary record that illuminates an international chocolate smuggling ring, the lives of the crew and mutineers, and the harrowing experience of the enslaved people trafficked by the Rising Sun.

Smuggling stood at the center of the lives of everyone involved with the business of the schooner. Larger forces, such as imperial trade restrictions, created the conditions for smuggling, but individual actors, often driven by raw ambition and with little regard for the consequences of their actions, designed, refined, and perpetuated this illicit commerce.

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA NETGALLEY. THANK YOU.

My Review: The first third of the book is explaining the mutineers, their lives, and their society to us; it is not the swiftest or most action-packed start. This was not a negative for this reader, as I was more than a little appalled and repulsed by the details of the lives chosen by dramatis personae in their access of greed.

The mutiny itself is an event that was documented well enough to give the author a lot of detail that he is not reluctant to share with us. As I am interested in the world these men inhabited, and as their actions and motives are so illuminating of the attitudes and the expectations of the time, I was again kept involved. Adequate citations matter to me in history reads and I was almost pleased with them here...could have had more in-line citations at times, but I was not left with the feeling he was making it up.

The last half was more the opinionating, and that was enough in line with my own strongly held opinions that I felt no dragging of my interest in the story of slaving, smuggling, and the awful human cost of people's love for chocolate (which I don't share). The mutineers were men of their time, they had no moral qualm with what was haening on the ship; they wanted more than they were getting of the proceeds from the captain's flouting of the laws of the Empire whose own greed was in conflict with all the men's personal greeds.

Edified, I was not. The so-called justice meted out on the mutineers appalled and disgusted me. It was, to my mind, a bit overplayed...but it was what factually happened to more men than these, and many better than these greedy fucks, whose moral compasses only saw the money that the moral outrage of slavery could bring.

This is a well-written and thoroughly researched (as far as records can go in this time, which is limited in both its completeness and survival). It is not action-packed, so look elsewhere for derring-do. It is a readable cauionary tale about the consequences to real human beings when their greed is untrammelled.