A Man Most Driven: Captain John Smith, Pocahontas and the Founding of America

by Peter Firstbrook

Overview

Everyone knows the story of Pocahontas, and how 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, so reputed for his truculence that the pilgrims of the Mayflower snubbed him when he offered them his services, though he was the unrivaled expert on America. Now, in the first major biography of Smith in decades, award-winning BBC filmmaker and author Peter Firstbrook ( The Obamas, Lost on Everest ) 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 mythology-making man and the invention of America.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781780747101
Publisher:	ONEWorld Publications
Publication date:	09/15/2015
Pages:	416
Product dimensions:	5.00(w) x 7.70(h) x 1.30(d)

About the Author

Peter Firstbrook is author of The Voyage of Matthew (about the explorer John Cabot), Lost on Everest (about George Mallory), and The Obamas: The Untold Story of an African Family . For 25 years, he worked for the BBC as a television producer, director, and executive producer specializing in historical documentaries. He has won over 30 international awards, including the Royal Television Society award for best documentary, twice. He lives in London.

Editorial Reviews

Captain John Smith’s iconic shadow still falls over Jamestown 400+ years after his 34-month sojourn in helping to found it…. A new and readable biography helps to brighten that shadow and add human dimensions to that icon: A Man Most Driven, by Peter Firstbrook…. This is a worthy addition to anyone’s library collection on Jamestown.”- First California Company, Jamestowne Society

“An assiduous researcher with a talent for cohesive narration, [Firstbrook] brushes aside the more common historian’s plagues of suspect first-person accounts and competing narratives. Smith’s autobiography, for instance, is the only record in many cases, but if a 10th of his bombastic tellings are true (and Firstbrook’s sleuthing convincingly puts them at a much higher percentage), he still led an astonishingly adventurous life.”- The Providence Journal , which named the book One of the Best Books of 2014

“Peter Firstbrook has written a book that grabs the reader at the Prologue and dangerously interferes with his sleep and his spouse’s good humor as he refuses to put it down! … This book will reside in an easy to find area of my shelf, for I know I will come back to it when I want to read a ‘real’ adventure story.” - Journal of the Early Americas

"A nuanced account of the English captain saved by Pocahontas reveals an astonishingly complicated personality. Exciting historical tales with romantic overtones." - Kirkus Reviews

"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." - Publishers Weekly

From the Publisher