The Incredible Story of Stephen Hopkins: From Surviving Jamestown to Saving Plymouth Colony

Amazon Customer: Stephen Hopkins is my husband's 11th great grandfather, so he was quite thrilled to receive this book as a gift. We both greatly enjoyed the read! The author did a fantastic job weaving together the extremely fascinating events of Stephen's life.

United States on Aug 18, 2023

William R. Penner: Since this was a recent discovery that Hopkins was a direct ancestor and had such an interesting life in early America, I was captured quickly about the details that Mr. Mack wrote. I believe it is important to mention that when reading this work, you should look for the word "likely" to caution about fact or potential fiction. I will say I believe he has drawn conclusions that make a lot of sense and is well worth reading.

United States on Mar 28, 2023

Malcolm Gillis: Almost all reviews of this book are positive, and I enthusiastically agree. (Especially so since my wife (and by extension, our children) can trace their ancestry directly back to Stephen Hopkins). But any reader remotely interested in an account of how English usurpers gained entrance to a 'brave new world', barely surviving their first year, and how nascent conflicts, both between the 'Saints' and the 'Strangers', and between all of them and America's native people, are still being played out today, will find this to be fascinating reading.

Canada on Oct 14, 2021

R. DelParto: Upon reading the title "A Stranger Among Saints: Stephen Hopkins The Man Who Survived Jamestown and Saved Plymouth" one will automatically wonder who was Stephen Hopkins. Author Jonathan Mack answers that question immediately in the first pages of the book and places the "stranger" Hopkins within the context of the most historic events in early American history, the proceeding the landing of 1607 in Jamestown and Plymouth in 1620 where he was joined the "saints" pilgrims. Mack writes an enlightening narrative that he researched and wove from sources from documents, literature, and artwork and illustrations to retell the place in history in which Hopkins and descendants contributed to this part of the historical past. As one continue to read the preliminary passages in the book, it is revealing and interesting to find that Hopkins happened to be at the right place at the right time.

The book is twofold. First, Mack concisely writes of the life of Stephen Hopkins that parallels with the William Shakespeare play "The Tempest" and an incident that Hopkins had been involved that was related to a shipwreck in Bermuda. Second, Hopkins was a participant in two of the most historic...

United States on Dec 06, 2020

Eventdriver EnochEventdriver Enoch: In this 400th Anniversary year of The Mayflower's transatlantic voyage, whether on of millions of Mayflower descendants or just interested in American history or cultural collisions and conflict, this book must be on your reading list. Jonathan Mack superbly weaves together the facts of history with a gift for storytelling buttressed by the inferences that a legal mind can bring to the pages of any brief. The footnotes alone are worth the price of the volume and the index is a tool for Genealogists searching for ancestral references.

Author Mack 's approach to the historical account is unvarnished - he exposes the reader to the good, the bad, and the abhorrent about England's colonial enterprise. The most intriguing parts of the book are the events and characters omitted from many accounts. In this volume we are exposed to the experience of the Jamestown Colony. We discover much about the Mayflower's forgotten companion vessel, Speedwell, and her passengers.

At the center of Mack's narrative is Stephen Hopkins, a common man thrust into the middle of opposing forces: a man who first must navigate his life's path between English nobility and his life as an indentured...

United States on Jul 12, 2020