From Booklist: Much has been discovered about pirates since Yolen wrote her first book on the subject, Pirates in Petticoats, in 1963. This new volume builds on those revelations in 12 portraits of sword- swinging, seafaring women throughout history, from Artemisia, in 500 B.C.E. Persia, to Madame Ching, an early nineteenth- century Chinese woman and named here as "the most successful pirate in the world." A long bibliography is appended, but there are no chapter notes to separate fact from folklore, and Yolen's conclusion further moves her subjects into the territory of legend: "There is so much storytelling, exaggeration, and just plain lying about the pirate trade that it's hard to say with absolute certainty that all the women pirates on these pages are real."...Still, the book is filled with fascinating, dramatically told stories and sidebars, and they could serve as a good starting point for further research, as well as discussions about historic accuracy and bias.
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