Philbrick has a gift for drawing telling details from the primary accounts on which much of his book is based. This narrative, of a small group finding its identity within a wild landscape, has all the wonder of a fable or a legend but it also has the conviction and verisimilitude of a faithful account.” - PETER ACKROYD, LONDON TIMES The adventures and misadventures of these pilgrims, in their first fatal steps on the unknown land, are recorded in exemplary detail this is living history at its best, animated and defined by human actions and reactions. Nathaniel Philbrick’s mastery of narrative becomes clear. Doing so requires a lot of reading between the lines (or in the case of the Indians reading between nearly nonexistent lines), but informed speculation-coaxing meaning out of inert data-is part of the job of writing history.” - RUSSELL SHORTO, NEW YORK TIMES SUNDAY BOOK REVIEW He gives what a 21st-century reader needs to find in the material: perspectives of both the English Americans and the Native Americans. his is a story that needs to be continually refreshed, and Philbrick has recast the Pilgrims for our age of searching and turmoil. But if Mayflower achieves the wide readership it deserves, perhaps a few Americans will be moved to reconsider all that.” - JONATHAN YARDLEY, WASHINGTON POST “We like our history sanitized and theme-parked and self-congratulatory, not bloody and angry and unflattering. Philbrick points out, the national memory tends to skip from the first Thanksgiving to the Shot Heard ‘Round the World without a clue about the 150 years in between.” - JANET MASLIN, NEW YORK TIMES Mayflower is a surprise-filled account of what are supposed to be some of the best-known events in this country’s past but are instead an occasion for collective amnesia.

“ has written a judicious, fascinating work of revisionist history.

Twenty weeks on the New York Times Bestseller list.Ī main selection of the Book of the Month ClubĪ Finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize

Salt Lake City Tribune, Best Books of 2006Ĭhristian Science Monitor, Best Books of 2006Īmerican Library Association, Notable Book of 2006 San Francisco Chronicle, Best Books of 2006 Finalist for the 2007 Pulitzer Prize in History

Nathaniel philbrick mayflower review