Customer Reviews

The Life of Nelson: The Embodiment of the Sea Power of Great Britain

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What, no reviews! Every once in a while you come across a book on a subject you love, and you realize that you have come across the definitive book in the area, and a literary gem, to boot, as well as a book for the ages. This is one of those books. And if you think I say this about many books, alas there are too few of them. I think of Boswell's Johnson, or Sobel's Longitude, or Grant's Memoirs.

I'd been reading and reading about Nelson and naval warfare in the age of sail. I read Mahan's Seapower. Then this book. In it all the details of Nelson's life that had been boring in other books took on meaning as they were weighed and sifted and given significance by the great judicial mind of Mahan, who sits as it were on the high bench and delivers his judgements on Nelson. And these judgements seem carved in oak or stone, so solid do they appear. So that as I read or peruse other tomes on Nelson, of which there are of course so many, Mahan seems already to have defused the controversy by having got there first, thought more intelligently, sifted more evidence, and delivered saner judgements.

It is truly one of the great books, beautifully written. If you want to understand Nelson, read this book. There is no other. And if you don't want to understand Nelson, read it as you might read Grant's Memoirs, because Edmund Wilson and Gertrude Stein thought it one of the great exemplars in our literature of the plain style. That is not to say that there are not a myriad books on Nelson and related topics that the avid enthusiast would want to read. Read them all! Just don't miss this one, too.

This book is hard to equal, and maybe impossible to beat, in terms of Nelson biographies. It's one century old but as fresh and relevant and accurate as if it had been written by a modern scholar with the vast array of Nelson papers to aid him or her. Mahan is Nelson's champion; no-one can doubt that. But he's not dishonest when presenting Nelson's strengths and weaknesses. Our admiral had both; which makes him understandable in a very human way. This is a fine book.

This is one of the classics on Nelson works. It has not been available for many years. It was good to have such easy access to this facsimile reprint to be able to add it to my library on Nelson.