H. M. S. Surprise (Vol. Book 3) (Aubrey/Maturin Novels) Review

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(More customer reviews)In praising Patrick O'Brian's Aubrey-Maturin books I am on well-trodden ground. In a sense, it is superfluous to do so: so many people, of such varied and excellent taste, have praised these books to the skies that further lauds from the modest likes of me are hardly necessary. Still, I'm glad to add my words. These stories concern Jack Aubrey, a ship captain in the English Navy at the time of the Napoleonic Wars, and his great friend Stephen Maturin, an Irish-Catalan doctor and spy who in the first book joins Jack's crew as ship doctor.
As H. M. S. Surpries opens, political machinations cost Jack his prize money (earned in the previous book0, and Stephen's cover in Spain is blown. As a result, and also because Stephen is scheming to see his lover Diana again (who has been taken by her keeper Richard Canning to India), Jack takes command of the aged frigate H.M.S. Surprise, and is sent to Cambodia (stopping in India) to deliver the new British envoy to the Sultan of Kampong.
Thus the setup for a long, wonderful, account of the voyage to the Orient and back. The pleasures of this book are remarkably varied: high comedy, such as the famous drunken sloth incident; high adventure, as the men of the Surprise battle not only the South Atlantic at its fiercest, but also the French; and bitter disappointment and even tragedy, in Stephen's seesaw relationship with Diana, as well as Stephen's involvement with a young Indian girl.
The pleasures of this book, however, are not restricted to a fine plot. The ongoing development of the characters of Jack and Stephen, and of their complex and fully described friendship, is a major achievement. In addition, the many minor characters are fascinating: the envoy Mr. Stanhope, Stephen's Indian friend, the various ship's officers and men, other ship captains, and so on. And O'Brian's depiction of the building of an effective crew, the relationship of captain to officers to men, is another fascinating detail, and something he revisits from book to book, as Jack encounters different crews in different circumstances. Finally, O'Brian is a fine writer of prose, with a faintly old-fashioned style, well poised to evoke the atmosphere of the time of which he writes to readers of our time, and consistently quotable, in his dry fashion.
Jack and Stephen are heroic in certain aspects of their characters, but they are both multi-faceted characters, with terrible flaws and endearing crotchets in addition to their accomplishments. And they truly come across to this reader as characters of their time, and not 20th Century people cast back into the past. Even Stephen's very contemporary racial and religious attitudes are well-motivated by his background, and expressed in language which reeks wonderfully of his time: "Stuff. I have the greatest esteem for Jews, if anyone can speak of a heterogeneous great body of men in such a meaningless, illiberal way."
I recommend all these books highly. It was with great difficulty the first time through the series that I restrained myself, upon finishing each book, from immediately starting in on the next one.

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Jack Aubrey Commands: An Historical Companion to the Naval World of Patrick O'Brian Review

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(More customer reviews)Brian Lavery is the author of the thoroughly excellent "Nelson's Navy", praised by Patrick O'Brian as the most nearly royal road to knowledge about the Royal Navy of the 1793-18115 period he knew. Lavery's new book, "Jack Aubrey's Commands: A Historical Companion to the Naval World of Patrick O'Brian", is quite evidently tied to the release of the film "Master and Commander: The Far Side of the World", based upon O'Brian's novels -- the book's foreword, after all, was written by Peter Weir. the director of the movie. But the book is at least as much directed towards the readers of O'Brian's novels as to viewers of the film (and more so, I would argue), and it should be equally enticing for those simply interested in that historical era. To be sure, Lavery's "Nelson's Navy" is an excellent reference book that contains far more detailed information than the present work, but "Jack Aubrey's Commands" is written in a more approachable style for the general reader, with a text that is meant to be read as a continuous whole, rather than as a collection of details and essays. Its particular strength lies in the numerous and lengthy quotes taken from contemporary sources, making the narrative more vivid and easy to relate to a living world long vanished. In this regard, "Jack Aubrey's Commands" serves as a companion to Lavery's own "Nelson's Navy" as well as to the novels of Patrick O'Brian.
Someone recently asked me whether it was better to buy "Jack Aubrey's Commands" or Richard O'Neill's recent "Patrick O'Brian's Navy: Jack Aubrey's World". Putting the obvious answer of "Buy both of them!" aside (and assuming that the reader already has Lavery's "Nelson's Navy" or feels that this earlier work is as yet too formidable to approach), then my recommendation would depend on the reader's personal preferences. Both volumes contain a good detail of information about the Royal Navy of Jack Aubrey's era. O'Neill's book is especially strong in the area of excellent period illustrations, Lavery's in the direction of narrative strength. The first is perhaps best for repeated browsing, the latter for a straightforward read.

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No fiction writer of modern times has captured the worldof wooden walls, broadsides, and the press gang as successfully asPatrick O'Brian. The twenty books in the O'Brian canon featuring thelives and adventures of Captain Jack Aubrey and his confidant, navalsurgeon Stephen Maturin, have been lauded across the world for theirblend of classic storytelling, historical accuracy, and inspiredcharacterizations. In this new work respected naval historian BrianLavery explores the historical framework of the O'Brian novels byexamining the facts behind the grand narrative and putting the keyepisodes in context while detailing naval life in the era of Nelsonand Napoleon. With well over a hundred illustrations, the bookpresents contemporary plans, drawings, engravings, maps, andphotographs of museum artifacts that have inspired age-of-sailnovelists and moviemakers. Introducing the book is a foreword by PeterWeir, director of the upcoming film of O'Brian's novel Master andCommander. Avid age-of-sail fans will not want to miss this colorfullydetailed complement to the O'Brian series.

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Empire of the Seas: How the Navy Forged the Modern World Review

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(More customer reviews)When it comes to publishing a book, any book!, colour and paper quality cost money. This particular product has 272 pages of top quality paper with colour images on almost every single page. To enable the potential buyer to visualise the work, it is almost A4 size and about one inch thick. In short, this is an awful lot of book for £20 (UK Price) - even more so when one studies the content.
Produced to accompany a forthcoming BBC TV series presented by Dan Snow, this work is written by Brian Lavery whose reputation and list of credits are as outstanding as they come. As Curator Emeritus of no less an institution than the National Maritime Museum, Greenwich, London, this author brings the highest possible standing to the subject. Having said that, I did pause when I came across those areas which I happened to know in sufficient detail in order to check the facts presented. Not only did I find no errors, but on two occasions my own knowledge was corrected! Such is the quality of the research, the detail and the presentation it all unites into a result on which you can rely.
Having said all that, there is so much more to this book than just a collection of Naval facts supported by excellent images. In addition, it must be said that the book also stands well on its own - in that you do not have to watch that forthcoming TV series in order to obtain maximum benefit from this product.
Dan Snow is the son of long-time British TV presenter Peter Snow and previously joined forces with his father to co-present such programmes as the excellent series "Battlefield Tour." My own personal view is that Dan is now ready for his own series and this opportunity will provide him with his own defining moment as he comes of age as a presenter in his own right. Just some private thoughts as I wish him well.
As far as the actual content is concerned; The reader is taken from the defeat of the Spanish Armada right through to WW1 - as seen through British naval ships, men, development and tactics and all, as I say, lavishly illustrated with images of the best possible quality. It is the components of this book which were the very ingredients that shaped a nation and an Empire on which the sun never set.
Finally, I am delighted the BBC have allowed Conway to reproduce this book. These publishers have an equally high reputation in the field of maritime books and, all things considered, everything here combines to produce the best possible product of the highest achievable standards on all fronts - "and" at a most reasonable price.
NM


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Heart of Oak: A Sailor's Life in Nelson's Navy Review

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(More customer reviews)James McGuane's "Heart of Oak" is a marvelous visual journey into, as the subtitle has it, "A Sailor's Life in Nelson's Navy". The book is filled with photographs of artifacts from British nautical museums (plus a number taken aboard HMS Victory and at other naval-related sites), pictures not of static, dead objects on dusty museum shelves, but photographs artfully dynamic, almost as if the tools portrayed were set down a few minutes ago and a horny-handed seaman might return shortly to resume his work. Many of the most fragile artifacts, such as a leather bucket and handmade trousers of light sailcloth, were recovered from the wreck of HMS Invincible lost in 1758, decades before the era of Horatio Nelson and Jack Aubrey, but nonetheless strongly representative of what would have still been found aboard a Royal Navy ship during the Napoleonic Wars. The range of articles pictured is remarkable: a tar brush, pistols and boarding pikes, sailmakers' fids, a surgeon's bleeding bowl, cable laid rope, a glim (the thick glass lens set into a powder magazine enclosure to admit light but not flame), a seaman's knit woolen cap, a ship's lead, hourglasses (well, 28-minute glasses, to be accurate), a square wooden plate with raised rim (keeps the food in place when the ship rolls), sailors' knives, a cat-o'-nine-tails, a pressgang's cosh, and much, much more. "Heart of Oak" is not a highly structured analysis of the physical accoutrements of nautical life two centuries ago, but it is a bit of a time machine, transporting the modern student of naval history (or a lover of the novels of Patrick O'Brian or C.S. Forester) back into that vanished world.

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Patrick O'Brian's Navy: The Illustrated Companion to Jack Aubrey's World Review

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(More customer reviews)"Patrick O'Brian's Navy: The Illustrated Companion to Jack Aubrey's World" is one of those books that doesn't really have an author. Richard O'Neill is listed as the Consulting Editor, but the Editor and Indexer is Philip de Ste. Croix, and there are a number of "Contributors" including David Miller, who has his own Jack Aubrey-related book coming out soon ("The World of Jack Aubrey").
This is a handsome coffee table-size volume, about 150 pages long, and heavily illustrated. The illustrations may be its strongest point - hundreds of them, mostly contemporary to Jack Aubrey's era and mostly reproduced in vivid color. I have seen many of them before, but usually in black-and-white, so even just on this score, "Patrick O'Brian's Navy" is an attractive addition to a historical nautical library. And there are some modern illustrations as well, usually in the form of diagrams to show complex information such as sail and rigging designations, crew assignments, and the arrangement of watches. Other data is conveyed in tabular form, like those for uniform details, prize money distribution, and crew organization for various ship classes.
Although the primary focus is upon the Royal Navy, there are also chapters devoted to what might be called the geo-political world of the Napoleonic Era. There is a conscious effort to tie all this to Jack Aubrey and the O'Brian novels, with the text, detailing historical events in which Jack took part (including those before the start of the book series) and occasionally providing sidebars titled "Through Aubrey's Eyes" that relate particular subjects to volume and chapter of the novels. Although the overall level of information presented cannot equal that in Brian Lavery's "Nelson's Navy", this is nonetheless an interesting compendium of facts and anecdotes.
There are also two short addendums: "A Cast of Characters" listing the major people and ships in the O'Brian novels and describing their actions and fates, and a Glossary of nautical terms and slang.

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From the moment that Master and Commander, the first of Patrick O'Brian's sequence of 20 novels about the 19th century British Royal Navy officer Jack Aubrey and his surgeon colleague Stephen Maturin, was published in 1970, critics hailed his work as a masterpiece of historical recreation. Called "the best historical novels ever written" by the New York Times, the books have sold millions of copies. This first full-color illustrated companion to the Aubrey-Maturin series, timed to coincide with the release of the blockbuster Twentieth-Century Fox film adaptation starring Russell Crowe, explains the fascinating physical details of Jack Aubrey's fictional world. An in-depth historical reference, it brings to life the political, cultural, and physical setting of O'Brian's novels. Annotated drawings, paintings, and diagrams reveal the complex parts of a ship and its rigging, weaponry, crew quarters and duties, below-deck conditions, and fighting tactics, while maps illustrate the location featured in each novel.

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