Taming the Pirates. (arrrr!)

Contrary to what you might expect from reading the title of this book, there's very little Jefferson in here. Which is a good thing because it's probably no secret to anyone who knows me very well that I hate Thomas Jefferson. And, if this book were about him I'd have to go off on a harangue about what a hypocritical sneaky son-of-a-bitch he is. Instead, I get to ramble about how great pirates and broadsides and 19th century sailing vessels are. Also the word scuttle is the shit.

The primary (and really only) problem with this book is the introduction where the author tries to be all topical and link the Barbary Wars with the Bush administration's "War on Terror". He stops drawing those parallels fairly early on, though, and settles into a rollicking recount of the relationships and battles of the Barbary Wars. This book is much more involving than Six Frigates (a book about the same general topic and time period). If you threw Jefferson's War into a time warp to 1801, you could use it as a recruitment tool for the early Navy.