Sir Joseph Banks: A Life - Hardcover

O'Brian, Patrick

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0002173506 ISBN 13: 9780002173506

Publisher: The Harvill Press, 1987

Synopsis

Sir Joseph Banks (1743-1820), was a naturalist, explorer, president for more than forty years of the Royal Society, Britain's oldest scientific institution, and one of Australia's founding fathers. He first rose to fame when, as a young botanist, he accompanied Captain Cook on his epic circumnavigation that resulted in the discovery of Australia. He was a central figure in a generation that transformed an insular monarchy into a modern industrial powerhouse. Yet a complete picture of Banks's long life has never emerged from the vast archive left at his death.
The young Banks sailed on expeditions to North America and Iceland as well as the Pacific; he was also instrumental in establishing Kew Gardens as one of the world's greatest botanical centers. An indefatigable correspondent, he had a wide circle of friends and associates, including Cuvier, Watt, Samuel Johnson, and Edward Gibbon.
Patrick O'Brian's masterful biography, which makes full use of Banks's letters and journals (some hitherto unknown), brings from the shadows a man of enduring importance. Banks emerges as a cheerful, forthright, and hospitable man whose true genius lay in promoting the enthusiasms of others. His legacy survives not only in his magnificent Florilegium, the record of his botanical studies in the South Seas, but in the development of the Australian continent and the tenor and tradition of subsequent scientific enterprise. Joseph Banks: A Life, gracefully written by one of England's prose masters, provides a fascinating overview of a full and important life.

About this title

Review:

Devotees of Patrick O'Brian's Aubrey/Maturin novels will know already the author's total immersion into the social, political, scientific and naval worlds of the 18th and early 19th centuries. The life of Sir Joseph Banks (1743-1820), naturalist, botanist and explorer who sailed with Captain Cook to the South Seas, has long been one of O'Brian's primary resources; so it is only fitting that he should also be Banks's biographer. Any other writer might have produced a worthy study of the scientist; O'Brian provides an affectionate account of the man, as well as illuminating with seemingly effortless erudition Banks's discoveries and those of his contemporaries. Encompassing as it does all of O'Brian's polymath fascinations, the only remarkable thing about this book is that he did not write it sooner. The novelist's eye for detail, familiar from the naval stories, is evident here (when Banks sails for Newfoundland in 1766 we learn, as a matter of course, that on April 22 the wind from Plymouth was east-north-east) as is his absorbing and witty prose style. Drawing extensively on Banks's letters and journals, the author also has to hand any number of illuminating references, from Admiralty records and proceedings of the Royal Society to the diaries of Fanny Burney and Mrs Thrale. From all these sources, as well as from his own empathy for the subject, O'Brian is able to paint a vivid portrait of an extraordinary man and his equally extraordinary discoveries. --Mark Walker

Review:

"O'Brian has done the reading public a service by unwrapping so elegantly and wittily a great man previously known only to specialists and academics. The book is a crackerjack" (Michael Fathers Independent)

"An absorbing finely-written overview... of a major figure in the history of natural science" (Los Angeles Times)

"Patrick O'Brian's leisurely and witty biography brings this 'genuine' Englishman fully to life... Banks epitomises the intrepid Englishman abroad... the prototype of the scientist dispassionately investigating all that befell him" (London Magazine)

"O'Brian reveals not only a well-researched understanding of his subject, but also an unabashed liking for him... Certainly any reader of this excellent book will close its final pages with a similar affection for Banks" (Michael Dirda Smithsonian)

About this edition

• Publisher: The Harvill Press
• Publication date: 1987
• ISBN 10: 0002173506
• ISBN 13: 9780002173506
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 384