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They're Cows, We're Pigs book cover
They're Cows, We're Pigs
1997
First Published
2.94
Average Rating
192
Number of Pages
The emerging societies of the Caribbean in the seventeenth century were a riotous assembly of pirates, aristocrats, revolutionaries, and rogues—outcasts and fortune seekers all. In They're Cows, We're Pigs, acclaimed Mexican novelist Carmen Boullosa animates this world of bloody chaos and uncertain possibility through the eyes of the young Jean Smeeks, kidnapped in Flanders at age thirteen and sold into indentured servitude on Tortuga, the mythical Treasure Island. Trained in the magic of medicine by le Negre Miel, an African slave healer, and Pineau, a French-born surgeon, Smeeks signs on as a medical officer with the pirate band the Brethren of the Coast. Transformed by the looting and violence of pirate life, Smeeks finds himself both healer and despoiler, servant and mercenary, suspended between the worlds of the law-abiding, tradition-bound "cows" and the freely roaming and raiding "pigs."
Avg Rating
2.94
Number of Ratings
69
5 STARS
10%
4 STARS
19%
3 STARS
42%
2 STARS
13%
1 STARS
16%
goodreads

Author

Carmen Boullosa
Carmen Boullosa
Author · 12 books

Carmen Boullosa (b. September 4, 1954 in Mexico City, Mexico) is a leading Mexican poet, novelist and playwright. Her work is eclectic and difficult to categorize, but it generally focuses on the issues of feminism and gender roles within a Latin American context. Her work has been praised by a number of prominent writers, including Carlos Fuentes, Alma Guillermoprieto and Elena Poniatowska, as well as publications such as Publishers Weekly. She has won a number of awards for her works, and has taught at universities such as Georgetown University, Columbia University and New York University (NYU), as well as at universities in nearly a dozen other countries. She is currently Distinguished Lecturer at the City College of New York. She has two children—Maria Aura and Juan Aura—with her former partner, Alejandro Aura—and is now married to Mike Wallace, the Pulitzer Prize–winning co-author of Gotham: A History of New York City to 1898. (from Wikipedia)

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