32 of 33 people found the following review helpful:
3.0 out of 5 stars
A one-sided view of Nelson, May 30, 2002
This review is from: The Nelson Touch: The Life and Legend of Horatio Nelson (Hardcover)
Horatio Nelson remains the greatest fighting admiral, bar none, in the history of naval warfare. But you'd never know it from reading journalist Terry Coleman's new book.
While Coleman has commendably explored many primary and early sources in building his portrait of Nelson, the result is brutally one-sided. Coleman's Nelson doesn't have the Nelson Touch, he puts the touch on everyone, stealing his tactics and victories and good publicity from everyone in sight. Coleman suggests that Nelson didn't capture the San Josef at Cape St. Vincent, that his victory at the Nile was apparently an accident, that Copenhagen was an illusion, and he wisely says as little as possible about the smashing victory at Trafalgar that both crowned and ended Nelson's career.
Coleman is particularly harsh in judging Nelson's behavior at Naples following the victory at the Nile, especially in regards to the execution of Caracciolo and Nelson's treatment of republican refugees after the restoration of the monarchy there. Indeed, this was Nelson's darkest hour. His actions remain so startling that I personally have always suspected that he suffered a brain injury at the Nile that affected his judgment and behavior. Coleman's opinions are fairly well justified by the evidence presented here and elsewhere.
Coleman's conclusions about Nelson's relationship with Lady Hamilton also prove to be of interest. He presents good evidence that their sexual relationship began a great deal later than usually suspected. His portrait of Lady Nelson is balanced and compassionate.
In his treatment of Nelson's family, Coleman has an absolute field day with Nelson's utterly worthless brother William, a not over-bright churchman who felt that the purpose of his brother's life was to use his influence to get him the best-paying job possible in the Church of England. This is one of the high points of Coleman's work; Nelson's family has usually been slighted in biographies of the admiral, and they were, with the exception of Nelson's likable father, a group of grasping, whining losers.
Where Coleman's biography truly falls short is in its emphasis on Nelson's faults. Coleman never fails to point out any of Nelson's human frailties. Nelson was indeed arrogant, self-centered, and sure of himself to an almost hilarious degree. He also was obviously a man deeply admired and loved by many of his contemporaries, and in this entire book you will search almost in vain for the human, charming, likable Nelson, just as you will have a hard time finding the brilliant tactician who was the terror of the Spanish, French, and Danish, the complex man whose religious faith was deep and unbending and who at the same time abandoned his wife. Coleman also enjoys pointing out how many of the officers Nelson promoted never rose above lieutenant; interestingly, he has nothing to say about the successful ones like Hoste.
I find it disturbing when an author's research is visibly faulty, as it leaves other portions of the book in question. For example, on page 356 of the hardcover edition, Coleman refers to the San Josef as a "fine 80," in other words an 80 gun ship. I am looking right now at the Admiralty draft of the San Josef (fortunately for naval historians the Royal Navy took the lines off of almost every enemy ship they captured), and the San Josef is in fact a three decker 112 gun first rate. Coleman also refers to the "only remaining frigates," the USS Constitution and the Constellation. The Constellation is not a frigate, being a sloop built just before the Civil War, and there are at least two British frigates that survive from just after Nelson's time, the Unicorn and the Trincomalee.
While Coleman has done a useful service in pointing out some of Nelson's faults, which admittedly many of the more hagiographic biographers have not, this revisionist biography is deeply flawed by its one-dimensional portrayal of a wonderfully complex, imperfect, deeply human man.
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28 of 29 people found the following review helpful:
2.0 out of 5 stars
Continuing the myths, December 2, 2002
By A Customer
This review is from: The Nelson Touch: The Life and Legend of Horatio Nelson (Hardcover)
Terry Coleman's biography of Nelson, while well written and entertaining, suffers greatly from the author's lack of research into his subject. So much has been written about Nelson and so much material is available to the true researcher, that it's a shame that Mr. Coleman didn't take advantage of it. It seems that much of his research came from reading other authors' not-well-researched books on Nelson and disregarded scholarly papers on the subject. The result is the continuation of many of the Neslonian myths. For example, Coleman portrays Nelson as a strict disciplinarian, whereas research into discipline records of the Royal Navy clearly demonstrates that Nelson was no more prone to discipline his men than the average captain of his day. In fact Nelson himself wrote of the need to treat men well, give them good living and working conditions and take care of their health. Coleman's treatment of the Battle of St. Vincent again underlines his lack of basic research and he continues the myth of Nelson's supposed disobedience to orders by wearing out of the line on his own accord. Very elementary research into the involved ships'logbooks (easily obtainable through the Public Record Office)clearly shows that Admiral Jervis ordered the fleet to tack at 12:50 p.m. and the log of Nelson's ship acknowledges receipt of that signal and the subsequent tack at 1:00 pm. The opportunity to explode a long-standing myth was missed. As pointed out by another reviewer, Coleman erroneously describes the San Josef as an 80-gun ship. While Coleman offers some interesting insight into the goings-on in Naples, many serious readers of naval history must take it with a grain of salt, given the author's elementary errors of fact elsewhere in the book
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29 of 31 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Oh, come on! This IS a good book., May 30, 2003
This review is from: The Nelson Touch: The Life and Legend of Horatio Nelson (Hardcover)
I don't think reviewers and critics are being entirely fair to Mr Coleman. This book is carefully researched, sound, and well written. So what's the problem?
I think Nelson's more ardent fans hate the fact that Coleman has done to the admiral what historian Alan Schom did to Napoleon: de-mythologise him. Present him as a human, not a demi-god.
Now, I confess that Nelson's among my own favorite heroes from history. And I simply loved Joel Hayward's "For God and Glory: Lord Nelson and his way of War", which may well be the best book on Nelson's combat and leadership abilities and techniques written in several decades.
So you would think, then, that I would be offended by Coleman's potrayal of Nelson. But I'm not. You see, humans aren't entirely good. Except maybe for Christ, Bhudda, Muhammad, Mother Theresa, etc. We are both good and bad. Nelson, even in Coleman's book, was mostly good, and only sometimes vain, silly, brutal, wicked, etc.
Is it unfair to say that. Of course not. And Coleman certainly does not present Nelson as a monster like Stalin.
I encourage readers to read this book, AND those by Carola Oman, Colin White, Tom Pocock and Joel Hayward. These are the best Nelson books, and will give all-round fair treatments of a flawed by nonetheless great Englishman.
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