John Paul Jones: Sailor, Hero, Father of the American Navy
The New York Times bestseller from master biographer Evan Thomas brings to life the tumultuous story of the father of the American Navy.
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.
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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Community Reviews
Notes are for myself, this is not a review. I’ve given this book 5 stars for the subject itself as well as the authors very lively writing and educated and reasonable vetting of legend and myth around it.
John Paul Jones is a legend not well known outside of history and naval buffs. Scratch just one layer deep into The Revolutionary War, American Naval history, or just great patriots in general and he will stick out through the prodigious amount of legend around the man.
What Thomson presents instead, especially shocking in the first few chapters for one with only this legend exposure to the man is a portrait of a very human subject.
From humble beginnings, Jones rise is a very American story that goes in twine with that of the New World. Thomson paints Jones close to what he was, drawing from the prodigious amount of personal correspondence by and about the man from himself and (some times not so) reliable contemporaries.
John Paul Jones is a legend not well known outside of history and naval buffs. Scratch just one layer deep into The Revolutionary War, American Naval history, or just great patriots in general and he will stick out through the prodigious amount of legend around the man.
What Thomson presents instead, especially shocking in the first few chapters for one with only this legend exposure to the man is a portrait of a very human subject.
From humble beginnings, Jones rise is a very American story that goes in twine with that of the New World. Thomson paints Jones close to what he was, drawing from the prodigious amount of personal correspondence by and about the man from himself and (some times not so) reliable contemporaries.
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