Daniel Defoe (–1731)

I think this is worth reading as a cultural artifact. Crusoe careened around the Atlantic enslaving people, and was then terrified of how he might be treated if he fell into their hands; his profound religious awakening and intimate relationship with an indigenous person (whose name he never asks) did not lead to any change in his views; his highest achievement as a person once enslaved himself was to become the feudal lord of a colony half-populated by more kidnapped and enslaved people. show more Crusoe is just face-meltingly abhorrent, and by the end I'd convinced myself that it was a satire of the English mindset of the time... Maybe it wasn't then, but it is now.

I liked the parts about danger and setting up systems of food production, though. show less

I don't care that this is "documentary novel", although I nearly only read nonfiction. Defoe seems so successful at putting me in London in 1665 that this was worth a second read. Reading of the "bring out your dead" cart-borne travails of Londoners of this time, I wonder how well a modern city would fair under the same circumstances. Considering Katrina, for instance, I doubt we would bear up as well as the Londoners and how they did bear up (in-home confinement, watchmen, open pit graves) show more is all laid out here with the quack nostrums of the time. show less

Rating: 5* of five

The Publisher Says: Restless Classics presents the Three-Hundredth Anniversary Edition of Robinson Crusoe, the classic Caribbean adventure story and foundational English novel, with new illustrations by Eko and an introduction by Jamaica Kincaid that contextualizes the book for our globalized, postcolonial era.

Three centuries after Daniel Defoe published Robinson Crusoe, this gripping tale of a castaway who spends thirty years on a remote tropical island near Trinidad, show more encountering cannibals, captives, and mutineers before being ultimately rescued, remains a classic of the adventure genre and is widely considered the first great English novel.

But the book also has much to teach us, in retrospect, about entrenched attitudes of colonizers toward the colonized that still resound today. As celebrated Caribbean writer Jamaica Kincaid writes in her bold new introduction, “The vivid, vibrant, subtle, important role of the tale of Robinson Crusoe, with his triumph of individual resilience and ingenuity wrapped up in his European, which is to say white, identity, has played in the long, uninterrupted literature of European conquest of the rest of the world must not be dismissed or ignored or silenced.”

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA EDELWEISS+. THANK YOU.

My Review: You really don't need me to mention anything about Defoe or his writing. Or, if you do, go to gutenberg dot org and download a free ebook of the text. You need to read it. Go on! Scoot! Come back when you've downloaded the ugly version. Or, if you're really lazy, go read the Wikipedia article to find out what it's about, so you can look at these illos with a properly appreciative eye.

This gorgeously illustrated tricentennial edition is entirely meant to be celebratory not introductory. I mean, look!


What stunning artwork, no? Any of them, but most especially #2 and #4 above, would work as wall art for me.

This is an elegant, easily-shelvable edition that will give you an æsthetic thrill every time you look at it. Anyone who already loves this fantastical story would enjoy the look and feel of it. Anyone who enjoys pretty editions of books as shelf decor would like it too, though I admit I frown on buying books that sit in one spot their whole lives by design. SOMEONE ought to read it. That's what a book is for!

Still and all I do not run the world (terrible oversight on the goddesses' part) so you enjoy things your own way. O.o

As Yule comes screaming in blazing hot like the ball of destruction it is on one's budget, reasonably priced beautiful things like this are welcome gifts. Especially to yourself. show less

I loved Moll Flanders, the character and the book. They are bawdy, but in that eighteenth century way, that lays everything between the sheets between the lines, and lets you use your own imagination, if you will. Defoe makes this sometimes tragic tale a kind of frolic. There is humor, and you cannot help rooting for the woman who is breaking the law, engaging in indiscriminate sex and sexual manipulations, and robbing people blind, while protesting how sorry she is she had to do it. I show more confess to not feeling the least sorry for anyone Moll might have harmed, except her children, who were so briefly dealt with that we forget them almost as cavalierly as Moll does.

I suppose Moll is a hardened criminal. She might have had an honest life several times during the course of the novel and she failed to secure it. She gets more opportunities than most women in her situation would have gotten, but she seems destined to find herself in a boiling pot time and again. Marriage being one of the few ways a woman might improve her status, Moll never fails to take advantage of a marriage vow. However, even if you only consider her marriage debacles, which I will not discuss here as that would be a major spoiler, you have to admit fate is very unkind. So, she is a criminal, but she is also a survivor, and it is the survivor in her that wins out for me.

She is a precursor for every strong woman who refuses to accept her fate and makes the most of her talents to survive the unsurvivable. She is Amber St. Clare, Scarlett O’Hara, and Dickens’ Nancy, with a different outcome. She’s a roll in the hay, but with purpose. I totally enjoyed her story. show less