Nancy Roberts, an author best known for her collections of ghost stories, was inspired to research pirates for a filmstrip (does anyone else remember filmstrips?) and, later, a book. The result, Blackbeard & Other Pirates of the Atlantic Coast, is an entertaining selection of brief biographical sketches of 18 pirates who spread terror along the eastern seaboard of the United States during the Golden Age of Piracy.

Many of the names here will be familiar, while some are less well known. So, among the likes of Edward "Blackbeard" Teach, Stede Bonnet, Charles Vane, Jack Rackham, Sam Bellamy and William Kidd, you'll find less famous pirates such as Thomas Pound, Lewis Guitar, William Fly, Charles Gibbs and Rachel Wall -- the latter of whom was born less than an hour's drive from where I am writing this.

Rather than presenting dry recitations of the bare facts -- which, in some cases, are fairly sparse -- Roberts spices up her text with imagined dialogue, which adds to the atmosphere without detracting from the scholarly nature of the book. In some cases, however, she stretches the limits of historical knowledge; for instance, she provides readers with a coda to the life of Anne Bonney after her trial and conviction when, in reality, no one knows what happened to the fierce, redheaded pirate after she was released from prison.

Each chapter is fairly short, none longer than 20 pages, but provides a fairly comprehensive summary of each pirate's life, tactics, area of operations and eventual fate. Some details are repeated in more than one chapter, as pirates such as Blackbeard, Vane, Bonnet, Rackham and Bonny were each involved in other stories.

Blackbeard & Other Pirates is an entertaining book on an interesting topic, and Roberts does a good job of bringing her subjects to life. While someone familiar with pirate history will likely know a lot of what's found here, it's also likely that readers will discover some interesting new facts along the way.

This book is highly recommended, especially for readers looking to explore the history of pirates for the first time.