| Product Summary | | Format: Paperback | | ISBN: 9780316289320 | | Publisher: Little Brown and Company | | Publish Date: 9/1/1985 | | Buy.com Sku: 30048013 | | Item#: RVCPT7 | | Dimensions (in Inches) 7.75H x 5.5L x 0.75T |
|
|
|
| | | June 1808, somewhere west of Nicaragua-a site suitable for spectacular sea battles. The Admiralty has ordered Captain Horatio Hornblower, now in command of the thirty-six-gun HMS Lydia, to form an alliance against the Spanish colonial government with an insane Spanish landowner; to find a water route across the Central American isthmus; and "to take, sink, burn or destroy" the fifty-gun Spanish ship of the line Natividad or face court-martial. A daunting enough set of orders-even if the happily married captain were not woefully distracted by the passenger he is obliged to take on in Panama: Lady Barbara Wellesley.
Annotation:
This volume is considered one of the best in the series of naval adventure tales by the famed British novelist. In this episode, Hornblower is sent to the Pacific coast of Central America on a secret mission for the Crown.
| PraiseSaturday Review
"Mr. Forester has followed 'The Gun' and 'The General' with another book that proves him a narrative craftsman in his own right. If, indeed, he alters the record a bit now and then, nobody but the nasty neat will care. His main facts are sound, and it is something beyond historical truth that he is after." 04/10/1937New Republic
"The figure of the captain is large and a trifle unlikely, the love angle a complete misfortune; but the constant play and elaboration of nautical procedure should make a sailor's delight." 04/14/1937 New York Times
"There is plenty of action. But there is also an unusual character study....Mr. Forester gives you both the rottenness and the heroism in as gripping and realistic a sea tale as you are likely to run across in a year's reading." 04/11/1937 |
| Author Bio| C. S. Forester | | Forester was the son of a British government official in the Egyptian Ministry of Education. When he was two, his mother returned with Forester and his four siblings to England, where the children were educated. After secondary school at Dulwich College, Forester sought to enter the army, but failed the physical and studied medicine instead. However, he abandoned his studies in 1921 in order to write, using Cecil Scott Forester as his pseudonym. He began by writing biographies of Napoleon and Josephine, but was soon writing such popular novels as PAYMENT DEFERRED (1930), which was made into a film, and THE AFRICAN QUEEN (1935), which became the 1951 film classic directed by John Huston. Forester was also in demand as a screenwriter, and served as a correspondent for the London Times during the Spanish Civil War. The first in his series of novels about the swashbuckling naval officer Horatio Hornblower, set during the Napoleonic Wars, appeared in 1937; it was a huge success. In all, Forester wrote 10 Horatio Hornblower novels, concluding with the last, unfinished, posthumous installment in 1967. For the first three books in the series, he was awarded the James Tait Black Memorial Prize--a recognition not only of their page-turning narrative drive but their literary quality. Forester was married twice, and lived in Berkeley, California during his latter years. He described himself as "gray suit, nondescript, with glasses." He was paralyzed after a 1964 stroke and died in 1966. |
| |
|
|
__USERID__
/prod/beat-to-quarters/q/loc/106/30048013.html
|
