A Man Most Driven: Captain John Smith, Pocahontas and the Founding of America

Everyone knows the story of Pocahontas, and how she saved John Smith. And were it not for Smith’s leadership, the Jamestown colony would surely have failed. Yet Smith was a far more ambitious explorer and soldier of fortune than these tales suggest — and a far more ambitious self-promoter, too, so reputed for his truculence that the pilgrims of the Mayflower snubbed him when he offered them his services, though he was the unrivaled expert on America. Now, in the first major biography of Smith in decades, award-winning BBC filmmaker and author Peter Firstbrook ( The Obamas, Lost on Everest ) traces the adventurer’s astonishing exploits across three continents, testing Smith’s own writings against the historical and geographical reality on the ground.

With A Man Most Driven , Firstbrook delivers a riveting, enlightening dissection of this mythology-making man and the invention of America.