Tenacious [Import] [Hardcover]

Julian Stockwin (Author)

Product Details

• Hardcover: 384 pages
• Publisher: Magna Large Print Books; Large Print Ed edition (July 15, 2007)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0750527226
• ISBN-13: 978-0750527224
• Product Dimensions: 9 x 6.2 x 1.1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.3 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 4.1 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (9 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #5,366,573 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

I wanted to go to sea ever since I can remember. My mother says that as a toddler I went up to sailors on the street, and on one occasion dragged home a dead seabird because it smelled of the sea! I was entranced when my great uncle Tom Clay, a seaman in square-rigged ships who had sailed around the Horn in the "Cutty Sark", took me over this ship. As a young boy I read everything about the sea and I was especially terrified by a description of a great storm, but longed to go to sea to experience one.
I won a scholarship to a grammar school, but my mind was captivated by seeing low grey shapes far out to sea, outward bound to who knew where. I passed this sight every day on my way to school; my scholastic performance suffered!
In the hope of having the nonsense knocked out of me, my father sent me to a tough sea-training school. This only strengthened my resolve for a life at sea and at fifteen I joined the Royal Navy.
After leaving the Navy (rated Petty Officer) I practised as an educational psychologist. I worked for some time in Hong Kong, where I was commissioned into the Royal Naval Reserve.
I now live in Devon with my wife and literary partner, Kathy - and two Siamese cats.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

10 of 10 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Another Great Kydd Novel, May 29, 2007

By 

A. Courie "Treb" (Freedom's Fortress) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Tenacious: A Kydd Sea Adventure (Kydd Sea Adventures) (Hardcover)

"Tenacious" is the sixth, and best so far, book in Julian Stockwin's "Kydd" series. These books are set in the Napoleonic-era Royal Navy and follow in the same vein as C.S. Forester's Horatio Hornblower and Patrick O'Brian's Aubrey-Maturin books.

In "Tenacious," Lieutenant Kydd is posted aboard the 64-gun Tenacious. Kydd sees action at the Battle of the Nile (where he meets Horatio Nelson and is inspired in his career by that great leader), the retaking of Minorca, and the Siege of Acre. Kydd, who began his career as a pressed seaman, is now a confident leader and officer in the Royal Navy - and more importantly, an inspired fighter.

Although this genre was obviously inspired by C.S. Forester and Patrick O'Brian, the Kydd novels remind me more of Bernard Cornwell's "Sharpe" series of books. Richard Sharpe started as a private in the British Army and ended up an officer, just as Kydd started as a pressed seaman and eventually walked the quarterdeck as an officer. But more than that, Kydd's adventures, and Stockwin's use of some dramatic license to involve Kydd in almost every major military engagement of the time (whether at land or at sea), are more in the style of the Sharpe books than the older Hornblower or Aubrey-Maturin books.

Stockwin can tell great sea tales about Thomas Kydd, and this book is a must-read for anyone who enjoys military historical fiction or the Napoleonic era.

5 of 5 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Kydd improves as Stockwyn does., January 13, 2007

By 

C. C. Southerland "Dorsalis" (Miami, Florida) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Tenacious: A Kydd Sea Adventure (Kydd Sea Adventures) (Hardcover)

The earlier Kydd sagas took a bit of fortitude to get through. Clearly, Stockwyn was so invested on seamanship, he did not seem as committed to spinng a page turning yarn. However, as time has gone on, Stockwyn and his hero, Kydd have improved. In this most recent novel, Stockwyn takes us into the presence of Lord Horatio Nelson, through the eyes of Thomas Kydd. It is a fascinating and compelling experience. The story is well told and of course endowed with the qualities of seamanship and historical perspective, which have made Julian Stockwyn a real master of this genre.

One feels the surge of rising along with Kydd, through the clumsy early novels, much like Kydd's clumsy growth before the mast. Now that he has become an officer, there is a greater sophistication to the plots and storylines, which truly make the reader feel the saga as a matter of personal experience.

Bravo Julian Stockwyn for germinating, tending and growing the fascinating, engaging Thomas Kydd!

4.0 out of 5 stars Onward and upward!, January 17, 2010

By 

Michael K. Smith (South Louisiana) - See all my reviews
(TOP 500 REVIEWER)   

This review is from: Tenacious: A Kydd Sea Adventure (Kydd Sea Adventures) (Hardcover)

It's 1798 and Thomas Paine Kydd, a wigmaker pressed into the Royal Navy only five years before and now junior lieutenant of an aging but still serviceable sixty-four, returns with his ship from Nova Scotia on the news that Gen. Buonaparte is readying an invasion of Britain. Of immediate concern, though, is the probable actions of the French fleet at Toulon. Britain was evicted from the Mediterranean awhile back and the French, with full freedom of movement now, could head east for the Levant or Constantinople (which would open up access to India), or west, to round Gibraltar, pick up the Spanish fleet at Cadiz and the rest of the French ships at Brest, where they would be well placed to act as backup in the invasion. Tom continues learning to be an effective officer, ordering and leading his division of the crew and looking after a promising young midshipman, and looking for opportunities to be noticed. Because he has discovered ambition and is set now on attaining his own command. But in many ways, the focus of this sixth volume in the series is Horatio, Lord Nelson, a junior admiral with a skyrocketing reputation and now detached to the Med in his first independent fleet command. The author does an excellent job of detailing the long chase from Toulon to Egypt to Malta to Sicily and back again to Alexandria as Nelson's small fleet searches for the elusive French. The culmination, of course, is the Battle of the Nile, where Buonaparte navy is not just defeated by the British but nearly annihilated, leaving the general and his army stranded in the desert. Everyone has heard of Nelson at Trafalgar but Stockwin is correct in regarding the Nile as the greater and far more influential victory, and his depiction of the action is extremely good -- especially the enormous explosion of L'ORIENT. The latter part of the story sees Kydd seconded ashore at Acre, where he becomes right-hand man to Sir Sydney Smith in the delaying siege that caused Buonaparte to abandon his army and sent him scurrying back to Paris. And Tom's close friend, Renzi, who is far more than he seems to most other people, is called back to the family estate in England, where he finally resolves his own dilemma. In a way, the series is falling more and more into line with previous Napoleonic-era naval series, now that Kydd is a quarterdeck officer, but the author -- whose grasp of his subject and the period has never been less than first-rate -- also seems to have hit his stride as a storyteller. This is perhaps the best in the series so far.