A dead man's chest wouldn't begin to hold all the books written about pirates. They range from ... There's no lack of pirat

A dead man's chest wouldn't begin to hold all the books written about pirates. They range from rousing tales of adventure to scholarly studies.

•Treasure Island (1883) by Robert Louis Stevenson. Young Jim Hawkins matches wits with the wily pirate Capt. Long John Silver in this rousing adventure novel. Every kid should read it, and every adult should reread it. "Yo-ho-ho, and a bottle of rum!"

•The Sea Hawk (1915) and Captain Blood (1922) by Rafael Sabatini. Two romantic swashbucklers in which the pirate captain is no cutthroat but a dashing gentleman sorely wronged. Think Errol Flynn, who played them on film.

•Peter and the Starcatchers (2004) by Dave Barry and Ridley Pearson. In this novel for young readers, humorist Barry and crime novelist Pearson write a sequel to J.M. Barrie's classic Peter Pan, answering such unanswered questions as where Captain Hook got his hook and where Tinkerbell came from.

•Under the Black Flag: The Romance and Reality of Life Among the Pirates (1996) by David Cordingly. Popular history that answers such questions as who were these guys (former merchant seamen or navy sailors), what motivated them (money and the easier life aboard pirate ships), how did they organize themselves (into a rough-hewn democracy, with crews electing captains). Of course, they were also mean, nasty and violent.

•Between the Devil and the Deep Blue Sea (1987) by Marcus Rediker. This Marxist-influenced book sets out "to recover the experiences of the common seaman in the first half of the 18th century." Sample chapter titles: "The Seaman as Wage Laborer" and "The Seaman as the 'Spirit of Rebellion.' " Scholarly but quite readable and often cited in other studies.

•The Pirate Wars (2003) by Peter Earle. Covers three centuries of piracy, from Elizabeth-era gentleman-privateers like Sir Francis Drake to the 1830s, when the last pirate captain was hanged in Boston.

•Blackbeard: America's Most Notorious Pirate (2006) by Angus Konstam and Captain Kidd and the War Against the Pirates (1986) by Robert C. Ritchie. Biographies of two of the most notorious swashbucklers of the golden age of piracy. Edward Teach, known as Blackbeard, was hardly the most successful pirate of the era — his career as an independent captain lasted less than a year and a half, Konstam says. But his ferocious, intimidating appearance and his weeklong blockade of Charleston, S.C., in 1718 made him, briefly, "America's bogeyman." He came to a bad end. As did William Kidd, who was commissioned to hunt pirates preying on East India Co. ships but who turned pirate himself. Hanged in 1701.

•Sodomy and the Perception of Evil: English Sea Rovers in the 17th-Century Caribbean (1983) by B.R. Burg and Rum, Sodomy and the Lash: Piracy, Sexuality and the Masculine Identity (1999) by Hans Turley. Pirates were big into gay sex, according to these scholars. Who knew?

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