Tuesday, July 20, 2004

Patrick O'Brian and the Aubrey-Maturin Series.   Patrick O'Brian's Jack Aubrey suceeded C.S. Forester's Horatio Hornblower, and succeeded him pretty well.  I read the HH books as a teenager, then discovered O'Brian's novels in my late 40's, and then I read the HH series all over again.  As you probably know, the recent motion picture Master and Commander is based on the O'Brian novels.  (The first novel in the series is titled Master and Commander, but the movie takes pieces from several books in the series and weaves them together for the screenplay.)   If the subject interests you, you might like to read two related articles in the December 2003 issue of the Smithsonian Magazine, the first about "Thomas Cochrane, the Napoleonic era's nautical maverick [who provided] the spark behind the fictional Jack Aubrey" and the second about O'Brian himself.  These articles are available in a PDF file on the Smithsonian Magazine website here.

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