for drive and resourcefulness”-adding that “unlike Arnold, Jones remained steadfast to the American cause,” though both complained about official indifference to their brilliance and about “commands offered and withdrawn.” Jones therefore stalked off to Paris after the war against England, where he nursed his wounds before finding work as an admiral in the navy of the Russian tsarina Catherine the Great.

He was given to mercurial moods and feelings of persecution anyway, writes Newsweek assistant managing editor Thomas ( Robert Kennedy, 2000, etc.), very much like his contemporary Benedict Arnold, whom Thomas considers to have been Jones’s “closest rival. Jones, already a legend in his early 30s thanks to his daring exploits aboard the Bonhomme Richard, wasn’t exactly forgotten at the end of the Revolution, although he felt ill-used when Congress ignored his offer to establish a naval academy and make America a maritime power and instead auctioned off the Continental Navy’s few surviving frigates. So be warned.Sturdy, seaworthy life of the Scottish-born hero of the American Revolution, whom John Adams characterized as “the most ambitious and intriguing officer in the American Navy.” This mispronunciation of terms begins to grate almost immediately, and I warn any sailor or mariner who listens to this audio-book, it get’s so consuming that you might have to stop listening. This is the first time I have ever stopped listening to an audio-selection and deleted it from my file library.

I have purchased well over 400 audio-books via this site, and have enjoyed the vast majority.

I know, I know, it makes no sense when applied to normal, everyday speech but this is not everyday speech, this is sailor-talk which has a vocabulary and pronunciation all its own.

An example: The “forecastle” should NEVER be pronounced “fore-castle” it is pronounced, “Foc-sil”. I’m sure this book in the print version is wonderful, so I cast absolutely no dispersions on the author… BUT, whoever found the narrator should have made sure that their reader actually knew how to pronounce fairly commonplace nautical terms, in what is after all a nautical biography.

John Paul Jones by Evan Thomas