Why did Bill love this book?
I loved reading this novel because it describes how people behave under extreme duress.
Set in the British Royal Navy of Napoleonic times, authenticity drips from every page. The time-honored ploy is the accidental coming together of a dissimilar pair to form a heroic but troubled partnership—think Don Quixote and Sancho Panza, or Holmes and Watson.
The book made me not only glad to be warm and dry, but also it made me wonder how I would have coped under such harrowing circumstances. It is unputdownable, but more than that, I learned a lot about myself without knowing it.
8 authors picked Master and Commander as one of their favorite books, and they share why you should read it.
This, the first in the splendid series of Jack Aubrey novels, establishes the friendship between Captain Aubrey, R.N., and Stephen Maturin, ship's surgeon and intelligence agent, against a thrilling backdrop of the Napoleonic wars. Details of a life aboard a man-of-war in Nelson's navy are faultlessly rendered: the conversational idiom of the officers in the ward room and the men on the lower deck, the food, the floggings, the mysteries of the wind and the rigging, and the roar of broadsides as the great ships close in battle.