HUGHES, Richard - A High Wind in Jamaica *** RECOMMENDED READING *** (Hardcover in Wrapper)

This is the 1965 edition - Previous owner's name inside - Book very good- Wrapper has slight mending to inside - Spine faded - Brian from Goodreads said  >>>   Lame-foot Sam told most stories.  He used to sit all day on the stone barbecues where the pimento was dried, digging maggots out of his toes.   When I read this passage on page six I just knew I was holding a champion of a book!    Pirates inadvertently kidnap a bunch of kids that are leaving Jamaica after a hurricane ravished the island. Their parents thought colonial life in Jamaica just too disturbing a place for children to be raised.  The pirates soon find the children just too disturbing a species to be in the company of even when weighed against their own pirates code of conduct.    Heralded by just about every review I came across as a precursor to Goldings Lord of the Flies, this book is by far the most disturbing and entertaining.  Both deal with kids pretty much left to their own devices.  But unlike Goldings kids, these children had no morals to progressively lose, no good to measure the bad, no civilization to judge the savagery.  Their behavior had the narrator thinking.   Possibly a case might be made out that children are not human either: but I should not accept it. Agreed that their minds are not just more ignorant and stupider than ours, but differ in kind of thinking (are mad, in fact)