All the Brave Fellows [Paperback]

James L. Nelson (Author)

Product Details

• Paperback
• Publisher: Pocket Books (2000)
• ASIN: B00125U2X2
• Average Customer Review: 4.5 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (13 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #9,562,510 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

I was born in a log cabin in the sea-side town of Lewiston, Maine.... Okay, maybe not a log cabin. And maybe Lewiston isn't exactly a seaside town. Despite that, my interest in ships and the sea began early, reading Hornblower and building ship models. In high school I built a fifteen foot sailboat, and with a friend, an eighteen foot canoe.
I graduated from Lewiston High School in 1980, if not with honors then at least with a diploma. After a year of hitchhiking and motorcycling around the country, I attended the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, later transferring to UCLA Film School (Official Motto: '...but what I really want to do is direct...') , from which I graduated in 1986. After working in the television industry for two years, I realized that I could not stand a) the television industry, b) Los Angeles and c) being ashore. In 1988 I joined the crew of the Golden Hinde (rhymes with mind), a replica of Sir Francis Drake's vessel of 1577. There I met a foretop person named Lisa Page, whom I beat out for the job of bosun. Lisa vowed then and there to marry me and make me pay for that for the rest of my life.
Leaving the Hinde in Houston, Texas, I worked aboard the brig Lady Washington (after my time she played the Interceptor in the first Pirates of the Caribbean movie) and the ship 'HMS' Rose, (Surprise in Master and Commander, also after my time) I sailed aboard Rose for two years, as Able Bodied Seaman and Third Mate.
In 1993, I 'swallowed the anchor.' Lisa Page, made good on her threat and we married that year. The following year I finished By Force of Arms, my first book. I've been a full-time writer since then, with fourteen books either published or in the process of being published. My books have sold in the United States, the United Kingdom, Germany, Italy and Spain. My 2003 title Glory in the Name was selected as the winner of the American Library Association's W.Y. Boyd Award for Excellence in Military Fiction.
Recently, my writing has expanded to include non-fiction. My first work of non-fiction was Reign of Iron, a detailed look at the ironclads Monitor and Merrimack (Virginia). More recently I completed a book about the Revolutionary war naval battle that took place on Lake Champlain. That book is called Benedict Arnold's Navy.
Lisa and I now live in Harpswell, Maine (which really is a seaside town), with our four children.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

7 of 7 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Authenticity and suspense create a winner, July 31, 2000

By 

Lynn Harnett (Marathon, FL USA) - See all my reviews
(VINE VOICE)    (TOP 500 REVIEWER)    (REAL NAME)   

This review is from: All the Brave Fellows (Revolution at Sea Saga, Book 5) (Hardcover)

What Patrick O'Brian did for the Royal Navy in his epic series, Maine author James L. Nelson is now doing for the fledgling American navy during the Revolutionary War. Rousing plots, historical authenticity and seafaring as vivid as a slap of salt spray or a whiff of the bilge will have readers hoping Nelson can make the American Revolution last a long, long time.

The fifth in the series featuring Captain Isaac Biddlecomb, "All the Brave Fellows," takes place during the fall of 1777. With his wife and infant son aboard, Biddlecomb sails for Philadelphia to take charge of the Falmouth, a 28-gun newly built frigate, and whisk it away from the city before General Howe's invading army can seize it.

For all Biddlecomb knows, he may already be too late. But trouble comes long before Philadelphia. In an exciting, well-constructed scene of warring strategies and over-eagerness, Biddlecomb, bolstered by the company of two privateers, takes on a lone British sloop of war. But the undisciplined privateers desert him at the first threat of British cannon and the enemy forces his beloved brig Charlemagne aground, where Biddlecomb burns it rather than let the ship fall into British hands.

Shaken by his responsibility for the danger to his wife and child as well as the loss of his ship, Biddlecomb is humbled, on foot, and stalked by his old nemesis Smeaton, (a British naval officer aboard the victorious sloop) whose career was earlier blighted by Biddlecomb and whose obsessive lust for revenge occasionally seems over the top.

Meanwhile, in Philadelphia, the Falmouth is endangered, with the British invasion proceeding and the Royal Navy overwhelming the hobbled-together Pennsylvania Navy. Master shipwright Malachi Foote desperately induces a band of Continental Army deserters to help him try to save the ship.

Point of view shifts between Biddlecomb and Foote with breathtaking suspense. But, while Nelson delivers plenty of action, he places it squarely in the context of history and character, involving the reader in the squabbles between factions of the former colonials' military. State navies, for instance, a bizarre concept to the modern mind, answering to an altogether different authority than the stripling Continental Navy.

And Biddlecomb's wife is a brave, spirited woman whose agenda is sometimes comically, sometimes wrenchingly different from her husband's. His struggle to balance domestic life with naval command is deftly done. "The difference between the great cabin and the quarterdeck was startling....It took genuine effort for Biddlecomb to shift his concerns from Jack's need to be burped to his ship's need to be driven into battle." And later, during an angry disagreement with his wife: "He longed to cross swords with Smeaton, or to plunge into the thick of battle, where the emotions - terror, hatred, rage - were so pure and uncomplicated."

Nelson's page-turner brings the Revolution to life on the high seas - buffeted by weather, tide and human frailty. "All the Brave Fellows" will please old fans and win new ones.

6 of 6 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Another Nelson Broadside, May 30, 2000

By 

Harry A. Welch (Meredith, NH USA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: All the Brave Fellows (Revolution at Sea Saga, Book 5) (Hardcover)

Once more James L. Nelson brings Capt Isaac Biddlecomb through one scrape after another. Hardly allowing the reader to catch his breath from one crisis to another, the Nelson style of 'no frills' and clean descriptive action plummets our hero from disaster to victory in a whirl wind of action. Never before have I been so dedicated to a story that I could not put it down before the smoke cleared from its final action. Mr. Nelson ties his fictional characters so closely to real history that sometimes it is difficult to unravel fact from fiction. I highly recommend this book to all lovers of tough living, hard fighting hero's of the high seas.

5 of 5 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Very Enjoyable, August 18, 2000

By 

Mike Garrett (Seattle, WA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: All the Brave Fellows (Revolution at Sea Saga, Book 5) (Hardcover)

I have read all of Nelson's Revolution at Sea books, and liked them all, but All the Brave Fellows is the best of the lot. A terrific read. I also loved the first book in Nelson's new trilogy, The Guardship, about an ex-pirate. It is edgier than the Biddlecomb books, but like Nelson's others, it is a fast paced, historically accurate novel. Fans of Isaac Biddlecomb should read The Guardship as well.