MAROONED

. . . a superb portrait of the founding, combining brilliant detail with epic sweep.

PUBLISHERS WEEKLY

If you think that American democracy began with the Pilgrims and the Mayflower Compact, my latest book might shake you up. Marooned retells the misunderstood story of Jamestown from the point of view of castaways, deserters, and mutineers.  The narrative ranges from the decks of pirate ships to the boards of Shakespeare’s stage, and it introduces the most important founding father you never heard of:  Stephen Hopkins, a humble farmer who,on uninhabited Bermuda.  He and his fellow castaways tried to live out a real-life “state of nature” long before Thomas Hobbes and John Locke made it the foundation of modern political theory. This new telling of an old story will change the way you think of Captain John Smith, Pocahontas, Powhatan, the infamous “staving time,” and the whole false start of American history we call Jamestown.

PUBLISHERS WEEKLY America is the land of runaways from colonial tyranny, according to this stimulating history of Jamestown. . . . . Kelly sets this gripping narrative against an intelligent discussion of sociocultural context, ranging from political philosophy to Shakespeare’s The Tempest. . . . [H]e paints a superb portrait of the founding, combining brilliant detail with epic sweep.

KIRKUS REVIEWS An insightful re-examination of the 1607 Jamestown settlement, the story of which is beginning to replace the Mayflower’s as America’s founding myth. . . . Discovering seeds of democracy in Massachusetts’ zealots or Virginia’s autocratic patricians has never been easy, but Kelly’s lively, heavily researched, frequently gruesome account gives a slight nod to Jamestown as the “better place to look for the genesis of American ideals.”

ROANOKE TIMES Kelly has woven a tapestry that is woven so dense in detail and so richly colored that it may become a kind of Bayeux Tapestry of the history of Jamestown…. By the time Kelly finishes his “new history,” the tapestry shows complex new understanding of the story of the founding of English America.  Woven into this story is the foundation of our ancestors’ pattern of interactions with the people whose land they claimed in the name of a king the Indians had never seen.