Type of bind: Unknown Type of bind
EAN num: 9781591971788
ISBN number: 1591971780
Label: Abdo Pub Co (E)
Manufacturer: Abdo Pub Co (E)
Printing Date: 2002-01
Publishing house: Abdo Pub Co (E)
Age index: Ages 9-12
Sale Popularity Level: 4684918
Studio: Abdo Pub Co (E)
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Editor's Notes and Comments:
Product Description:
Written in 1897, Kipling's adventure tale relates how the over-indulged son of a millionaire finds himself serving aboard a Portuguese fishing vessel. The superstitious world of the sea and the tough, orderly life of the ship form a backdrop to the boy's transition into manhood.
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Rated by buyers 
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This is a great book with a classic theme - and a fantastic depiction of a long-gone time and place. In a nutshell: the rich, snotty, spoiled, neglected teenager who's never done a day's work in his life falls off his Atlantic ocean-liner and ends up rescued by a tough, working-class fishing schooner where they refuse to believe he's rich, refuse to take his nonsense, and instead impress him into work - and in so doing help him find his humanity. I love the theme not just for its overt message, but because of the metaphor it encapsulates: that anyone can blossom in the right environment. Kudos, Rudyard Kipling: not bad for a book written in 1897!
Now my complaints:
1) The book dragged, especially in the paunchy middle. Too often the drama faded and the story became an endless repetition of fisherman's chores. Here I skimmed, to little loss.
2) Many of the fisherman's stories made no sense to me, and it wasn't for lack of trying on my side. Frustrating! Many times I found myself wishing for textual annotations.
3) In that vein: I found a hefty chunk of the dialogue unreadable. I'm pretty good at reading phonetics, which helped a lot, but many times when I decoded a word it proved only to be obscure, archaic maritime vocabulary.
4) I get tired of books (modern or old) that extol violence as a necessary cure for spoiled kids. Yes, I understand how the captain punching the boy in the nose "worked" in this context, but violence proponents (and Kipling) too easily ignore the twisted motives hidden behind parental violence, not to mention the reality that violence ultimately begets resentment, primitiveness, and more violence.
Rated by buyers 
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This is still a great book for young readers (and old ones) who want to know what working life was really like for some in the eastern U.S. and Canada a hundred years ago. No picnic. The great thing is seeing it all in a gripping, often amazing, based-on-fact tale that centers on several teenaged boys who are part of a crew of a New England fishing boat. Death, mayhem, hardship, struggle, grim lessons, ultimate triumph in its strange way--all here along with a great portrait of poor men from all parts scraping to make a living on the sea. For what it tells about our history and the kinds of life our great-grandfathers led, this is Kipling's best, in my opinion.
Rated by buyers -
This is an excellent book for a young man, especially. It reminds us that character is developed through struggle, and that spoiling a child does him no good. I recommend that you give this book to any young boy who longs for adventure, but doesn't realize that it tends to come with a cost.
Keep developing your chidlren's minds, parents! Good things will result.
Rated by buyers -
Captains Courageous takes the tried and true plot of the spoiled city child who is rescued through the magic of hard work and honest living. Harvey Cheyne Jr. is washed off a steamship and left for dead, but is instead rescued by fishermen who take him into their boat for the season.
This is, honestly, the very first Kipling that I have ever read (aside from excerpts). His writing has been one of my larger gaps, and this seemed a good book with which to begin. The dialect is at times difficult, but did not really find it a barrier to understanding. I enjoyed the book. I particularly enjoyed the way the plot extended past Harvey's homecoming. Many books with a similar story end it after the rescue with no extension into the character's life. I also enjoyed the section with The Cheynes and their train ride.
A solid, entertaining sea yarn which seems likely to appeal to bookish young people. I may be damning the work with faint praise, but there you go.
p.s. If I started a band, I would call it Disko Troop.
Rated by buyers -
When I started this book, I couldn't help but make some comparisons to Jack London's, Sea Wolf. The protagonist is picked up by a boat at sea and wants to be dropped off on shore, but the captain refuses and, instead, solicits his help on the ship's voyage, hoping to teach him something about real work along the way. And right about there the two novels diverge. While Jack London's, Sea Wolf goes through an increasingly complicated plot and conflict, Rudyard Kipling's, Captains Courageous simply lets us in on the cruise. Though they take two very different courses, I think that they both succeeded in their separate endeavors. Kipling relies on his description and scenes to set the story before us, and he achieves this masterfully. Describing life on board a fishing vessel could very easily turn out to be tedious, but Kipling uses such nice language and great characters that you almost feel as if you are there experiencing it with them, through the good and the bad. The ending is hardly surprising, but more importantly it feels right. One thing to note is that, while Kipling does describe things fairly well, this is still written back in the age of sail, so many of the terms are taken for granted for someone not well versed in that era. If that is the case, the reader might feel lost for a good portion of the story. Still, the writing is pleasant enough that you almost don't need to know what is going on, you're just happy to be along for the ride.
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