SOURCE: “The Very Social Scientist,” in Los Angeles Times Book Review, April 4, 1993, p. 9.

In the following review, Stewart praises O'Brian's ability to skillfully condense large amounts of biographical material in Joseph Banks: A Life, but complains that O'Brian shows too much deference to his subject.

When Captain James Cook returned from his first great circumnavigation of the globe in 1771, the British public was wild with admiration. We have forgotten, though, that public adoration at the time was not for James Cook at all but for his young naturalist passenger, Joseph Banks, whose life Patrick O'Brian recounts in Joseph Banks: A Life. As quickly as the Endeavor docked, Cook was shunted aside and forgotten in the excitement. The expedition was popularly referred to as “Mr. Banks's Voyage,” and some newspapers reported—wrongly—that Banks and not Cook had been the ship's commander.

Before the voyage, Joseph Banks had published...