SOURCE: A review of Joseph Banks: A Life, in Smithsonian, Vol. 24, No. 5, August, 1993, p. 106.

In the following review, Dirda offers a positive assessment of Joseph Banks: A Life, calling the biography “well-researched.”

Anyone who regularly reads historical novels or remembers with pleasure C. S. Forester's Horatio Hornblower sea stories probably already knows about Patrick O'Brian. Over the past two or three years O'Brian's adventure novels about Captain Jack Aubrey and surgeon-spy Stephen Maturin—there are about 15, all set during the Napoleonic Wars—stopped being coterie classics and found a wide, appreciative audience. Reviewers competed in their choice of superlatives; bookstores vainly tried to keep Master and Commander or The Letter of Marque in stock. After a lifetime of writing and translating (Simone de Beauvoir, among others) Patrick O'Brian was, at nearly 80, a literary celebrity.

One benefit of that renown is the American publication of O'Brian's 1987 life of Joseph...