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Desolation Island (The Aubrey/Maturin Novels, Book 5) |  | Author: Patrick O'Brian
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
Category: Book
List Price: $14.95
Buy Used: $0.19
as of 3/14/2010 07:54 PDT details
You Save: $14.76 (99%)
Seller: abmediaservices
Rating:  53 reviews
Sales Rank: 16608
Media: Paperback
Edition: later printing
Pages: 352
Number Of Items: 1
Shipping Weight (lbs): 0.8
Dimensions (in): 8.2 x 5.5 x 0.8
ISBN: 039330812X
Dewey Decimal Number: 823.914
EAN: 9780393308129
ASIN: 039330812X
Publication Date: August 17, 1991
Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days
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| Editorial Reviews:
Amazon.com Review
Captain Bligh (yes, the guy from the Bounty) needs to be rescued, and the Royal Navy has the perfect man for the job: Captain Jack Aubrey. With his friend and cloak-and-dagger expert Stephen Maturin in tow, Aubrey sets off for Australia. Several factors, including an attractive spy and a small-scale epidemic, conspire to change his plans, and before long his frigate is being pursued into Antarctic waters by a Dutch man-of-war. Five installments into the series, the Aubrey-Maturin story remains (to quote The Observer) "the best thing afloat since Horatio Hornblower."
Product Description
Commissioned to rescue Governor Bligh of Bounty fame, Captain Jack Aubrey and Stephen Maturin sail the Leopard to Australia with a hold full of convicts.
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| Customer Reviews:
Showing reviews 1-5 of 53
 um yea 5 January 30, 2010
D. J. Bohn (Northville, MI United States)
one of the best of the series.
this guy is so good i can't really give a criticism.
well. i a, ...
Best starter novel for O'Brian series. November 21, 2009
Charles Croft
When I start talking to people who want to get into the Patrick O'Brian series, I always recommend that they read Desolation Island first. Somehow this novel stands on it's own more than any of O'Brian's Aubrey Maturin series. You get you a superior novel without having to have read the earlier books. Desolation Island displays the splendor of O'Brian's writing, tells a gripping story, plus it makes you feel like an insider in O'Brian's world when you go back and read Master and Commander and then you are totally hooked from Chapter One!
Geoff Hunt: Portrait of a Marine Artist
Extensively shows how Geoff painted the cover for this book. Tells what it was like working with O'Brian
Geoff Hunt: Painting in the Studio
Geoff painted all of O'Brian's covers - incredible artist!
High Seas Schooner: Voyage of the Harvey Gamage
Award winning documentary shot in heavy seas in the North Atlantic.
Utterly sublime brilliance June 2, 2009
R. Clarke (Chicago)
1 out of 1 found this review helpful
If there is any better writing in the English language than the couple of chapters in Desolation Island where the Leopard is being pursued by the Waakzaamheid, and the aftermath thereof, then I've certainly never read it.
You don't have to read many of these books before going back to other authors starts to feel like going from reading the Wall Street Journal to a British red-top tabloid.
On the whole I think Desolation Island is the best of the series, the worst of which is many times better than any other novels I've ever read.
 Implausible, and unrelentingly depressing, and increasingly unlikely October 14, 2008
Todd Stockslager (Raleigh, NC)
0 out of 1 found this review helpful
Not the best of the series so far, despite great action and character development through the first half. The second half of the book is taken up by a series of potential disasters, from a chase by a more powerful enemy, to a near-fatal fight with the enemy during a hurricane blow, to hitting an iceberg, to a near-mutiny, to nearly sinking due to a leak from the iceberg hit, to nearly starting the War of 1812 with an American whaling ship whose sheltering bay they have unwittingly invaded to try to fix the ship enough to move on.
All of these things were be truly potential dangers of any voyage, and there were probably voyages in the golden days of the British Navy as cursed as this, but in fiction it just seems implausible, and unrelentingly depressing, and increasingly unlikely that anyone would survive all these things on one voyage.
And the book concludes with Captain Jack and the Doc still stranded on the island, but with the ship fixed and an international incident averted. It should make for an interesting start to the next in the series!
Sixth in the series: The Fortune of War (Aubrey Maturin Series)
 Aubrey shipwreck on land / master at sea April 12, 2008
J. Hinkel
I enjoyed this book. Besides the fact that Napoleonic History is a hobby of mine, I believe that the author truly has put to words what a naval commander must feel while assigned to year long mission. Aubrey is miserable on land and yearns for another command even though that means leaving his wife and young children. While Aubrey is a hero on the high seas, he is a ship wreck on terra firma. Back at sea, he comes back to life but begins to feel isolated from a crew that hasn't entirely warmed to him. As always his physician, Maturin makes insightful analysis of his friend Jack, but that is not all.
We begin to see more into Maturin's alternate persona, as a highly trusted intelligence agent, as he is entrusted with delivering an American spy to the Botany Bay penal colony. Has the good Dr successfully manipulated the American spy after arranging for her "escape?" We will see.
Throughout the voyage we are treated to the author's great tale-telling: cat-and-mouse encounter with a Dutch ship-of-the-line as well as the perils of the South Atlantic.
Definitely worth reading.
Showing reviews 1-5 of 53
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