Stuff
Adobe DRM
Product Details
Simon & Schuster, June 2010
eBook, 400 pages
ISBN-10: 1451603991
ISBN-13: 9781451603996
Description
John Paul Jones, at sea and in the heat of the battle, was the great American hero of the Age of Sail. He was to history what Patrick O'Brian's Jack Aubrey and C. S. Forester's Horatio Hornblower are to fiction. Ruthless, indomitable, clever; he vowed to sail, as he put it, "in harm's way." Evan Thomas's minute-by-minute re-creation of the bloodbath between Jones's Bonhomme Richard and the British man-of-war Serapis off the coast of England on an autumn night in 1779 is as gripping a sea battle as can be found in any novel.
Drawing on Jones's correspondence with some of the most significant figures of the American Revolution -- John Adams, Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Jefferson -- Thomas's biography teaches us that it took fighters as well as thinkers, men driven by dreams of personal glory as well as high-minded principle, to break free of the past and start a new world. Jones's spirit was classically American.
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Browse Inside John Paul JonesNathaniel Philbrick
The New York Times Book Review
A penetrating biography...an adventure story....Part George Patton, part Jesse James, Jones was, as it turns out, a perfect American hero.
The Washington Post
Every sentence is written with grace and style....Thomas opens a window on the squalid, demeaning, and hazardous milieu of eighteenth-century mariners and provides unsurpassed descriptions of naval battles.
Chicago Sun-Times
His stirring accounts of Jones's sea battles will delight those
who loved Patrick O'Brian's novels about Capt. Jack Aubrey and C. S.
Forester's tales of Horatio Hornblower.
San Luis Obispo.com, May 8, 2010
...Evan Thomas, the author of 'The War Lovers: Roosevelt, Lodge, Hearst, and the Rush to Empire,' will be at the Hearst Castle Visitor Center from 1 to 4 p.m. Saturday ...
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