Captains Courageous
by Rudyard Kipling
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Book Summary Information
Author: Rudyard KiplingEditor: 1stWorld Library
Edition: Hardcover
Audio: English (Original Language); English (Unknown); English (Published)
Published: 2006-02-20
ISBN: 1421808668
Number of pages: 220
Publisher: 1st World Library - Literary Society
Book Reviews of Captains Courageous
Book Review: Beautiful book, IF you can read phonetics AND skim
Summary: 3 Stars
This is a great book with a classic theme - and a fantastic depiction of a long-gone time and place. In a nutshell: the rich, snotty, spoiled, neglected teenager who's never done a day's work in his life falls off his Atlantic ocean-liner and ends up rescued by a tough, working-class fishing schooner where they refuse to believe he's rich, refuse to take his nonsense, and instead impress him into work - and in so doing help him find his humanity. I love the theme not just for its overt message, but because of the metaphor it encapsulates: that anyone can blossom in the right environment. Kudos, Rudyard Kipling: not bad for a book written in 1897!
Now my complaints:
1) The book dragged, especially in the paunchy middle. Too often the drama faded and the story became an endless repetition of fisherman's chores. Here I skimmed, to little loss.
2) Many of the fisherman's stories made no sense to me, and it wasn't for lack of trying on my side. Frustrating! Many times I found myself wishing for textual annotations.
3) In that vein: I found a hefty chunk of the dialogue unreadable. I'm pretty good at reading phonetics, which helped a lot, but many times when I decoded a word it proved only to be obscure, archaic maritime vocabulary.
4) I get tired of books (modern or old) that extol violence as a necessary cure for spoiled kids. Yes, I understand how the captain punching the boy in the nose "worked" in this context, but violence proponents (and Kipling) too easily ignore the twisted motives hidden behind parental violence, not to mention the reality that violence ultimately begets resentment, primitiveness, and more violence.
Summary of Captains Courageous
The weather door of the smoking-room had been left open to the North Atlantic fog, as the big liner rolled and lifted, whistling to warn the fishing-fleet. "That Cheyne boy's the biggest nuisance aboard," said a man in a frieze overcoat, shutting the door with a bang. "He isn't wanted here. He's too fresh." A white-haired German reached for a sandwich, and grunted between bites: "I know der breed. Ameriga is full of dot kind. I deli you you should imbort ropes' ends free under your dariff." "Pshaw! There isn't any real harm to him. He's more to be pitied than anything," a man from New York drawled, as he lay at full length along the cushions under the wet skylight. "They've dragged him around from hotel to hotel ever since he was a kid. I was talking to his mother this morning. She's a lovely lady, but she don't pretend to manage him. He's going to Europe to finish his education."Kipling, Rudyard Books
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