Criticism > Contemporary Literary Criticism > O'Brian, Patrick - Michael Dirda (review date August 1993)

1. Printable Version
2. Download PDF
3. Cite this Page

Michael Dirda (review date August 1993)

SOURCE: A review of Joseph Banks: A Life, in Smithsonian, Vol. 24, No. 5, August, 1993, p. 106.

[In the following review, Dirda offers a positive assessment of Joseph Banks: A Life, calling the biography “well-researched.”]

Anyone who regularly reads historical novels or remembers with pleasure C. S. Forester's Horatio Hornblower sea stories probably already knows about Patrick O'Brian. Over the past two or three years O'Brian's adventure novels about Captain Jack Aubrey and surgeon-spy Stephen Maturin—there are about 15, all set during the Napoleonic Wars—stopped being coterie classics and found a wide, appreciative audience. Reviewers competed in their choice of superlatives; bookstores vainly tried to keep Master and Commander or The Letter of Marque in stock. After a lifetime of writing and translating (Simone de Beauvoir, among others) Patrick O'Brian was, at...

Join eNotes

The above is a free excerpt. Get total access to this content with the:

eNotes Pass

1. Introduction
2. Principal Works
3. Criticism
   1. John Bayley (essay date 7 November 1991)
   2. Frank Stewart (review date 4 April 1993)
   3. Byron Rogers (review date 10 July 1993)
   4. Michael Dirda (review date August 1993)
   5. Patrick T. Reardon (review date 19 December 1993)
   6. Frederick Pratter (review date 31 December 1993)
   7. John Balzar (review date 2 January 1994)
   8. Thomas McGonigle (review date 2 January 1994)
   9. Elliott Abrams (review date 24 January 1994)
   10. James Hamilton-Paterson (review date 26 December 1994)
   11. Frederick Pratter (review date 2 May 1995)
   12. Katherine A. Powers (review date July 1995)
   13. Sam Pickering (review date Spring 1996)
   14. Thomas R. Edwards (essay date Summer 1996)
   15. John Balzar (review date 20 October 1996)
   16. Edward T. Wheeler (review date 8 November 1996)
   17. Christopher Clausen (review date 16 December 1996)
   18. James Teacher (review date 4 January 1997)
   19. John Mullan (review date 10 January 1997)
   20. Books Magazine (review date October 1997)
   21. Molly Finn (essay date 19 June 1998)
   22. Alan Judd (review date 22 August 1998)
   23. Barbara Everett (review date 4 September 1998)
   24. Martin Jacques (review date 6 September 1998)
   25. Christopher Hitchens (essay date 9 March 2000)
4. Further Reading
5. Copyright