The Dragons of the Storm (In the Land of Whispers #2) - Hardcover

George Robert Minkoff

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 092970181X ISBN 13: 9780929701813

Publisher: McPherson, 2007

Synopsis

The Dragons of the Storm continues directly from The Weight of Smoke. When Powhatan forcibly adopted Captain John Smith into his tribe, he declared that after three wounds the river would speak to him. While fishing in the Chesapeake toward the end of a long expedition, Smith is stabbed by a stingray and falls deathly ill. Because he is set to assume the presidency of Jamestown on their return, the fate of the colony may depend upon his recovery. The old alchemist and mariner, Jonas Profit, doctors this second wound, and to ease Smith's suffering starts to tell of the daring circumnavigation of the world by Francis Drake. So begins the second volume of George Robert Minkoff's visionary epic, In the Land of Whispers, revealing the desperate events in the lives of both Drake and Smith that will lead finally to a permanent settlement for the Elizabethans in the New World. John Smith is followed from the initiations of the first volume into a year of unforseen trials and their consequence: while the London Company's aristocrats broker the colony's fate with their wealth and power, the colonists struggle an ocean away just to survive in an unforgiving land. Famine, contagion, mutiny, and war with Powhatan threaten constantly. Among the 'gentlemen,' ignorance and arrogance joust with greed for supremacy. And the one man who might save Jamestown from itself, John Smith, will have to confront not only the venality of his enemies, and the legacy of his spiritual fathers, but the mysteries of his own destiny.

About this title

About the Author

George Robert Minkoff was raised on Long Island. He graduated from Clark University in 1965. For four decades he has been a noted antiquarian and rare book dealer living in the Berkshires of Massachusetts and New York City. Mr. Minkoff began writing plays in the late 1960s, but a decade later the publisher of Putnam, William Targ, urged him instead to write novels. Inspired by one of his teen-aged sons, the trilogy In the Land of Whispers began as a one-act play to dramatize the absurdity between the reach of the first English settlers and their grasp, but as Minkoff dealt with the historical materials he realized there was a far greater story to be told -- a story of intertwined illusions: alchemy (the reigning science), tobacco (presumed a miracle drug), and the Elizabethan mind. The final volume of In the Land of Whispers will be released in 2010.

Reviews

In the second volume of Minkoff's trilogy, he continues detailing the tumultuous founding of the Virginia colony. Using the same metaphor-laden Elizabethan language of the first volume, he begins awkwardly with an old mariner recounting his years serving under two masters, Sir Francis Drake and Captain John Smith. Drake's story of Pacific exploration (seeking shorter trade routes for Queen Elizabeth) dominates the narrative with tales of even-handed interaction with natives, numerous enemy Spanish ships and traitorous ship hands. His successes contrast with Smith's tale, in which he faces off against his own men, the wily Chief Powhatan and other natives, as well as with fresh boatloads of British immigrants with high expectations for their new lives and low opinions of Smith. Antiquarian book dealer Minkoff saddles his characters with ornate speech ("I will hold the story to its wrist, while other flap words") that more often obfuscates than elucidates, making this rambling tale all the more laborious.
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Edition details

• Publisher: McPherson
• Publication date: 2007
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 092970181X
• ISBN 13: 9780929701813
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 352