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Table of Contents
About The Book
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.
Product Details
- Publisher: Simon & Schuster (May 10, 2004)
- Length: 400 pages
- ISBN13: 9780743258043
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Raves and Reviews
Nathaniel 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.
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- Book Cover Image (jpg): John Paul Jones Trade Paperback 9780743258043
- Author Photo (jpg): Evan Thomas Photo Credit:(0.1 MB)
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