Joseph Banks A Life

About this book

Originally published by Harvill Press in 1987 and reissued in paperback in 1997.

Sir Joseph Banks – botanist, explorer, President of the Royal Society and one of Australia's founding fathers – was among the most influential figures of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. As a young man, he accompanied Captain Cook on his voyage of discovery to Australia. In later years, he was instrumental in establishing Kew Gardens as the greatest botanical centre in the world, and he knew just about everybody who mattered in the scientific circles of the time.

Patrick O'Brian's masterly biography draws on much hitherto unpublished material. Far from being the colossus of science traditionally imagined, Joseph Banks emerges here as a warm-hearted enthusiast whose legacy survives not only in the record of his botanising in the South Seas but in the development of the Australian continent and in the tenor and tradition of subsequent scientific inquiry.

Customer Reviews

Biography

Patrick O'Brian was born in 1914 and published his first book, Caesar, when he was only fifteen. In the 1960s, he began work on the idea that, over the next four decades, evolved into the twenty-novel-long Aubrey-Maturin series (with an extra unfinished volume published posthumously). In 1995, he was awarded the CBE, and in 199,7 he received an honorary doctorate of letters from Trinity College, Dublin. He died in January 2000 at the age of 85.