You want a real pirate adventure story, check out Keith Richard’s autobiography, Life.
I’m a Stones fan but early on I realized I was actually more of a Keith Richards fan. Maybe non fans won’t see this book the same way I did, but I loved it. While reading this, I couldn’t help think of the Pirates of the Caribbean movies. When I first heard about that Disneyland ride as a basis for a movie, a long movie, I thought, how stupid. But the movie turns out to be pretty entertaining and the reason is that Johnny Depp gives an amazing and strangely charismatic performance as Jack Sparrow. Reading this book, I realized that Keith Richards is Jack Sparrow. When you think of "pirates" there are the bad kind, the real kind, which you might find off the coast of Somalia and then there are the romanticized ones who never existed. The closest you’ll get is Keith Richards. And it’s not just me. In the book I counted at least ten incidental allusions to pirates. Listen to the last few seconds of Keith’s song "Struggle"; you’d swear that’s Jack Sparrow. To see Depp playing Sparrow is entertaining; to realize that it’s based on a real dude whose life is no less improbable is quite something else. Simple scriptwriting keeps Sparrow alive (or at least coming back from the dead). Keith’s ability to remain with the living is a genuine string of swashbuckling miracles.
I usually don’t get too much into celebrity gossip, but Keith’s life is really not your typical celebrity. His goals seem to be different. He’s not your average publicity whore. He does actually seem to really be most concerned about music. I personally hear that on his records, but the book contextualizes it nicely. I appreciated the discussion about his distinctive sound which, for its simplicity, is quite difficult to reproduce. As Keith says, without the right guitar tuning (GDGBD) "…it just won’t work."
I thought the book was quite well crafted. The other author did a fine job keeping everything organized and flowing. The only odd thing about it was that there was an "About the Author" section. Uh, wasn’t that what we just spent 500+ pages reading? But overall, very cool.