Pirattitude!: So You Wanna Be A Pirate? Here’s How!

By now, International Talk Like A Pirate Day has become a fairly well-known way for people to act goofy, but let’s face it, no one wants to be restricted to one day a year. So the holiday’s founders, John “Ol’ Chumbucket” Baur and Mark “Cap’n Slappy” Summers wrote Pirattitude—and while it especially deals with how to celebrate TLAPD (Sept. 19), there’s plenty of other information on pirate parties, pirate weddings and anything else pirate they decided to throw in. To that end, a good 80-pages worth of rather corny material could have really been trimmed. Fans of Dave Barry (who wrote the book’s introduction and helped promote the holiday in his Miami Herald column) are sure to recognize a writing style that does its best to emulate the humorist. And while Barry’s style works well for books about computers and dogs, when it gets applied to a subject like pirates, the humor comes off as rather wishy-washy. That being said, there are more than a few good laughs and some fun pirate facts to be had. Yo ho ho!