Reviews for Mad Jack The Biography of Captain John Percival, Usn, 1779-1862

The average rating for Mad Jack The Biography of Captain John Percival, Usn, 1779-1862 based on 2 reviews is 3 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2013-04-05 00:00:00 Steve Bahnsen This is not Professor Long's best work, and I believe it was his last book. His biography of Porter, written many years earlier was fabulous. Here, not only is Long hampered by having a disagreeable subject--irascible may have been invented to describe him--Percival left very little documentation for a historian, who is thus left with the duty correspondence, conflicts, court martial testimony, and other people's (usually negative) opinions of Percival. About Percival's personal life we're left with pretty much nothing but guesswork. And the disagreeableness continues into an apparent professional spat with Linda (McKee) Maloney (the insistence on including the McKee EVERY TIME seems to be a pointed reference that she's somehow related to Christopher McKee, another naval historian, like that matters), the biographer of Isaac Hull. Maloney apparently disagreed with Long in various respects vis-a-vis Bainbridge and Hull. Because of the vagaries of interlibrary loan due dates, I'm in the middle of reading both Long's biography of Bainbridge at the same time as Maloney's biography of Hull. I don't know if I've ever seen a historian in a biography so consistently call out a fellow *male* biographer of a different person so pointedly, which gave it a "get off my lawn, woman" sort of vibe. (I don't really want to form an opinion about the biographer when I read a biography--that's not why I'm reading the bio--but this book made me think I wouldn't invite Long to a dinner party if he were still alive.) There's quite a bit of "I'm not going to go into any detail about this here but see my chapter in X book and Y chapter in another book," and regarding a mutiny, he points out that most of his written material about the mutiny has been cut from the manuscript. It's not only sloppy and lazy writing, but it left me thinking what the hell the editors were smoking when they let that slip past. For all that: what was documented about Percival was well-documented, and Long had probably forgotten more about naval history when he wrote this than I'll ever know. I didn't learn much about the pre-1820 navy, but it's a good source for antebellum information. This is worth hunting down via ILL, but not even the sources and notes are worth the high price the book is commanding on the used market.

Review # 2 was written on 2016-11-20 00:00:00 Michael Osborne Fascinating story of the rise of a young poor girl from St Louis who became the toast of Paris and the rest of Europe, meeting heads of state and royalty. She spied successfully for the French in North Africa during WW2, married four times and bought a chateau which she tried to turn into a centre of brotherhood, adopting 12 children from all over the world to form the core. As her fame grew, so did her ambitions and her money diminished. She grew desperate to raise more funds "to feed my children" whilst still living the life of the grande dame leaving debts in her wake. I began by admiring her climb to fame but she used people appalingly, including her husbands and people soon grew suspicious of her motives. She was an extremely interesting woman who could have done so much more if she'd just stopped to take the advice of those closest to her.