They're Cows, We're Pigs (Paperback) (ISBN-13: 9780802137869)

The emerging societies of the Caribbean in the seventeenth century were a riotous assembly of pirates, aristocrats, revolutionaries, and rogues -- outcasts and fortune seekers all. In They're Cows, We're Pigs, acclaimed Mexican novelist Carmen Boullosa animates this world of bloody chaos and uncertain possibility through the eyes of the young Jean Smeeks, kidnapped in Flanders at age thirteen and sold into indentured servitude on Tortuga, the mythical Treasure Island. Trained in the magic of medicine by le Negre Miel, an African slave healer, and Pineau, a French-born surgeon, Smeeks signs on as a medical officer with the pirate band the Brethren of the Coast. Transformed by the looting and violence of pirate life, Smeeks finds himself both healer and despoiler, servant and mercenary, suspended between the worlds of the law-abiding, tradition-bound "cows" and the freely roaming and raiding "pigs."

Author: Carmen Boullosa
ISBN-10: 0802137865
ISBN-13: 9780802137869
Publisher: Grove Press
Language: English
Published: 02/07/2001
Pages: 192
Format: Paperback
Weight: 0.54lbs
Size: 8.25h x 5.50w x 0.45d

Review Citation(s):
New York Times 03/18/2001 pg. 24