Ethan's Reviews > The Pirate Coast: Thomas Jefferson, the First Marines & the Secret Mission of 1805

The Pirate Coast is an excellent book to expand your knowledge of both the waning years of the Barbary Coast and the young United States. Unfortunately, it is not as good a source of history for the young Marine Corps, something the book seems to tout in its description and in its detail and emphasis on the few Marines in who marched across the desert into Tripoli.

That said, this is an excellent book. It reads well and is a story pieced together from the numerous amounts of facts which Richard Zacks collected. It tells a winning, though not florid, tale of William Eaton and his exploits. The pictures of others involved is not quite as nice, but, based on the journal entries from various men that are found in the book, it seems to be an accurate picture. It is a story that is, in the end, quite unsatisfying, but the United States' war with Tripoli was a disappointing and terrible fiasco which, in words Eaton might have used, were dishonorable and unworthy of the United States.