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January/February--Orphan Train and Thomas Jefferson and the Tripoli Pirates

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  1. Lorie Dewey:
    I found the book Thomas Jefferson’s Tripoli Pirates interesting. Not sure about whether students would. I love history and although this wasn’t really a history more of an overview it was rather dry. At the very end of the book there was one mention of the way Jefferson’s naval battle was similar to what’s going on over there today but it seemed too little too late to make it relevant. I think it would have been much more interesting if they had made those correlations from the beginning. I do think that I learned some things I didn’t know about the commanders of those famous ships , some of it good and a lot of it bad. Jefferson really picked some losers in the beginning which lead to years of defeat. There were of course some amazing men. One thing that struck me ,was because communication was so very difficult, things took forever to get resolved. In the end Jefferson lived long enough to see it resolved to an extent , and managed to wait to die on the fourth of July as did his friend John Adams.

    Not my favorite book but it did make a strong point for a strong navy and Marine Corp.

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