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Title: Command a King's Ship: The Richard Bolitho Novels (Richard Bolitho Novel , No 6) by Alexander Kent ISBN: 0-935526-50-1 Publisher: McBooks Press Pub. Date: May, 2002 Format: Paperback Volumes: 1 List Price(USD): $14.95 |
Average Customer Rating: 4 (8 reviews)
Rating: 3
Summary: Adventure packed
Comment: Alexander Kent is an excellent author. The adventure sequences in his novels are the type that you just can't put down once you are emersed in the story. Unlike other adventure novels where the hero has super human powers Bolitho is genuinely human and protrays human emotions in all of the stories that I have read including Command a Kings Ship.
Rating: 5
Summary: A gripping sea story
Comment:
As I have noted before in other reviews, Kent is a great story teller. In this one, after the peace is signed at Versailles between France and England following the American Revolutionary War, the protagonist of the series (this is number five in the Bolitho series), Richard Bolitho, is given command of a 24 gun frigate, the Undine (a fifth rater), and ordered to India, where his task is to assist in taking over a Spanish post, which is to revert to the British flag. The post's governor is an admiral under whom he has previously served, and who is trying to restore his reputation after a bad command call in a previous sea battle..
There is skullduggery almost immediately, including plots to sabotage the deal by the French, who are in league with local pirates, and a love affair with a British government officer's wife. Bolitho, it would seem, is naive about women and driven more by his glands than his brain (as are many young men).
In any case, this is a whale of a story, and it will keep you reading far into the night--especially if you have reached the age when vicarious adventure is more appealing than the more dangerous kind, as have I.
Joseph (Joe) Pierre, USN (Ret)
author of Handguns and Freedom...their care and maintenance
and other books
Rating: 3
Summary: Intriguing but confusing
Comment: Bolitho has two shocks on a voyage in the Tempest to a trading outpost in SE Asia and faces the bleakest prospect yet when he arrives, up against an angry pirate king with two frigates to his one. Bolitho has never been so close to utter defeat as here. In this plot Kent awards Bolitho a bit more luck than logic. It seems odd no one ever gets a tropical fever.
I like how Kent fills his stories not only with naval actions but little mysteries, or here "peacetime" intrigues and ambitions in the Far East. Kent has the ability to rapidly shift the reader's perspective from one character's thoughts to another's in a smooth and always clear manner. Most other naval authors focus on their hero alone, and everyone else is seen from outside.
I had two problems with this novel. I had trouble visualizing the ship maneuvres relative to land. Action proceeds and suddenly there's land or a channel where I didn't expect it, or on the opposite side from where I imagined it. Most disconcerting. It's possible I need to keep much more exact track of passing mentions of wind direction, tack, and course because Kent offers few other clues and does not describe them in laymen's (landsmen's) terms. It is vital to know, for instance, that starboard tack means sailing to the LEFT (with the WIND from the right), or "helm a lee" means turning into the wind. And of course there are no maps, there never are in Kent's stories. The one in Dean King's "A Sea of Words" (an O'Brian companion) is not quite right. Masts and lamps are frequently described as "spiralling" when surely "circling" to the motion of the ship is meant? Most seriously, for a subject that produces so much of the motivation in this story (and the next two), Kent never made me like Bolitho's great love, Viola. She starts out as just another arrogant aristo who makes eyes at our Richard, and it seems stupid he falls for her. Maybe that's part of the loneliness of command.
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Title: Form Line of Battle (Richard Bolitho Novels/Alexander Kent, No 9) by Alexander Kent ISBN: 0935526595 Publisher: McBooks Press Pub. Date: May, 2002 List Price(USD): $14.95 |
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Title: In Gallant Company (Richard Bolitho Novels/Alexander Kent, No 3) by Alexander Kent ISBN: 0935526439 Publisher: McBooks Press Pub. Date: May, 2002 List Price(USD): $14.95 |
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Title: Enemy in Sight (Richard Bolitho Novels/Alexander Kent No 10) by Alexander Kent ISBN: 0935526609 Publisher: McBooks Press Pub. Date: May, 2002 List Price(USD): $15.95 |
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Title: The Flag Captain (Richard Bolitho Novels/Alexander Kent, No 11) by Alexander Kent ISBN: 0935526668 Publisher: McBooks Press Pub. Date: May, 2002 List Price(USD): $15.95 |
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Title: Signal-Close Action (Richard Bolitho Novels/Alexander Kent, No 12) by Alexander Kent ISBN: 0935526676 Publisher: McBooks Press Pub. Date: October, 1999 List Price(USD): $15.95 |
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