Kate’s 2¢: “Hussein” by Patrick O’Brian

“Hussein” by Patrick O’Brian

Kate’s 2¢: There is a plethora of in-depth biographies of authors and reviews of their books, that state the title, author, published date, and genre; as well as,     describing what the book is about, setting, and character(s), so, Kate’s 2¢ merely shares my thoughts about what I read.  I’m just saying…

   This story reminds me of “The Iliad and the Odyessee”. Hussein just keeps going from one ill-fated adventure to another. I enjoyed this story and learned some things about elephants and Hussein’s culture. Annice Blake did a good job of reading this story from the Marrakesh collection.

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

O’Brian was christened as Richard Patrick Russ, in Chalfont St Peter, Buckinghamshire, a son of Charles Russ, an English physician of German descent, and Jessie Russ (née Goddard), an English woman of Irish descent.[citation needed] The eighth of nine children, O’Brian lost his mother at the age of four, and his biographers describe a fairly isolated childhood, limited by poverty, with sporadic schooling, at St Marylebone Grammar School from 1924 to 1926, while living in Putney, and then at Lewes Grammar School, from September 1926 to July 1929, after the family moved to Lewes, East Sussex,[1] but with intervals at home with his father and stepmother Zoe Center.[2]

His literary career began in his childhood, with the publication of his earliest works, including several short stories. The book Hussein, An Entertainment published by Oxford University Press in 1938, and the short-story collection Beasts Royal brought considerable critical praise, especially considering his youth.[3] He published his first novel at age 15, Caesar: The Life Story of a Panda Leopard, with help from his father.[3]: 50 [4][5]

In 1927 he applied unsuccessfully to enter the Royal Naval College, Dartmouth.[6] In 1934, he underwent a brief period of pilot training with the Royal Air Force, but that was not successful and he left the RAF. Prior to that, his application to join the Royal Navy had been rejected on health grounds.[2] In 1935, he was living in London, where he married his first wife, Elizabeth Jones, in 1936. They had two children. The second was a daughter who suffered from spina bifida, and died in 1942, aged three, in a country village in Sussex. When the child died, O’Brian had already returned to London, where he worked throughout the war.

The details of his employment during the Second World War are murky. He worked as an ambulance driver, and he stated that he worked in intelligence in the Political Intelligence Department (PID).[7] Dean King has said O’Brian was actively involved in intelligence work and perhaps special operations overseas during the war.[3]: 89–104  Indeed, despite his usual extreme reticence about his past, O’Brian wrote in an essay, “Black, Choleric and Married?”, included in the book Patrick O’Brian: Critical Appreciations and a Bibliography (1994)[8] that: “Some time after the blitz had died away I joined one of those intelligence organisations that flourished during the War, perpetually changing their initials and competing with one another. Our work had to do with France, and more than that I shall not say, since disclosing methods and stratagems that have deceived the enemy once and that may deceive him again seems to me foolish. After the war we retired to Wales (I say we because my wife and I had driven ambulances and served in intelligence together) where we lived for a while in a high Welsh-speaking valley…” which confirms in first person the intelligence connection, as well as introducing his wife Mary Tolstoy, née Wicksteed, as a co-worker and fellow intelligence operative.

Nikolai Tolstoy, stepson through O’Brian’s marriage to Mary, disputes that account,[9] confirming only that O’Brian worked as a volunteer ambulance driver during the Blitz when he met Mary, the separated wife of Russian-born nobleman and lawyer Count Dimitri Tolstoy. They lived together through the latter part of the war and, after both were divorced from their previous spouses, they married in July 1945. The following month he changed his name by deed poll to Patrick O’Brian.

Sailing experience[edit]

As background to his later sea-going novels, O’Brian did claim to have had limited experience on a square-rigged sailing vessel, as described within his previously-quoted 1994 essay:

The disease that racked my bosom every now and then did not much affect my strength and when it left me in peace (for there were long remissions) sea-air and sea-voyages were recommended. An uncle had a two-ton sloop and several friends had boats, which was fine, but what was even better was that my particular friend Edward, who shared a tutor with me, had a cousin who possessed an ocean-going yacht, a converted square-rigged merchantman, that he used to crew with undergraduates and fair-sized boys, together with some real seamen, and sail far off into the Atlantic. The young are wonderfully resilient, and although I never became much of a topman, after a while I could hand, reef and steer without disgrace, which allowed more ambitious sailoring later on.[8]

However, in 1995, venture capitalist Thomas Perkins offered O’Brian a two-week cruise aboard his then sailing yacht, a 154-foot (47 m) ketch. In an article about the experience written after O’Brian’s death, Perkins commented that “… his knowledge of the practical aspects of sailing seemed, amazingly, almost nil” and “… he seemed to have no feeling for the wind and the course, and frequently I had to intervene to prevent a full standing gybe. I began to suspect that his autobiographical references to his months at sea as a youth were fanciful.”[10]

Life after the Second World War[edit]

Between 1946 and 1949 the O’Brians lived in Cwm Croesor, a remote valley in north Wales, where they initially rented a cottage from Clough Williams-Ellis. O’Brian pursued his interest in natural history; he fished, went birdwatching, and followed the local hunt. During this time they lived on Mary O’Brian’s small income and the limited earnings from O’Brian’s writings.

In 1949 O’Brian and Mary moved to Collioure, a Catalan town in southern France. He and Mary remained together in Collioure until her death in 1998. Mary’s love and support were critical to O’Brian throughout his career. She worked with him in the British Library in the 1940s as he collected source material for his anthology A Book of Voyages, which became the first book to bear his new name – the book was among his favourites, because of this close collaboration. The death of his wife in March 1998 was a tremendous blow to O’Brian. In the last two years of his life, particularly once the details of his early life were revealed to the world, he was a “lonely, tortured, and at the last possibly paranoid figure.”[11]

Media exposure and controversy in his final years[edit]

O’Brian protected his privacy fiercely and was usually reluctant to reveal any details about his private life or past, preferring to include no biographical details on his book jackets and supplying only a minimum of personal information when pressed to do so.[11] For many years reviewers and journalists presumed he was Irish,[12] and he took no steps to correct the impression. One interviewer, Mark Horowitz, described the man in his late seventies as “a compact, austere gentleman. … his pale, watchful eyes are clear and alert.”[13] He is polite, formal, and erudite in conversation, an erudition that Horowitz said could be intimidating. He learned from those who worked with O’Brian that the erudition did not go unnoticed, while they remained friends.

Richard Ollard, a naval historian, calls this particular habit “blowing people out of the game.” Ollard, who edited the early Aubrey–Maturin novels, urged O’Brian to tone down the most obscure allusions, though the books remain crammed with Latin tags, antiquated medical terminology and an endless stream of marvellous sounding but impenetrable naval jargon. “Like many who have struggled themselves”, Ollard said of his friend, “he thought others should struggle, too.” One longtime acquaintance put it more bluntly: “Patrick can be a bit of a snob, socially and intellectually.”[13]

In 1998, a BBC documentary and an exposé in The Daily Telegraph[14] made public the facts of his ancestry, original name and first marriage, provoking considerable critical media comment. In his biography of O’Brian,[11] Nikolai Tolstoy claims to give a more accurate and balanced account of his late stepfather’s character, actions and motives, particularly in respect of his first marriage and family.

From NLS/BARD/LOC:

Hussein: an entertainment DBG05636

O’Brian, Patrick Reading time: 8 hours, 7 minutes.

Annice Blake. A production of CNIB.

Adventure

Animals and Wildlife

Hussein, a young mahout (elephant handler) in India, takes charge of his elephant, becomes a farmer, loses his crop, murders a money-lending priest, saves a sahib from a tiger, goes on the run, becomes involved in a political assassination, and falls in love. O’Brian’s second novel, written thirty years before the “Master and Commander” series. Some descriptions of violence. c1938. Marrakesh title.

Download Hussein: an entertainment DBG05636

Kate’s 2¢: “Into the deep” by Colleen Coble

“Into the deep” by Colleen Coble

Kate’s 2¢: There is a plethora of in-depth biographies of authors and reviews of their books, that state the title, author, published date, and genre; as well as,     describing what the book is about, setting, and character(s), so, Kate’s 2¢ merely shares my thoughts about what I read.  I’m just saying…

   Dana Hopkins read this story for the  Canadian National Institute for the Blind  and was included in the Marrakesh titles and shared with the NLS.

From her website at www.colleencoble.com.

Best-selling romantic suspense author Colleen Coble’s novels have won or finaled in awards ranging from the Best Books of Indiana, the ACFW Carol Award, the Romance Writers of America RITA, the Holt Medallion, the Daphne du Maurier, National Readers’ Choice, and the Booksellers Best. She has over 4 million books in print and her books have been on the USAToday bestseller list, the ECPA, CBA, Publishers Weekly, and Amazon bestseller lists. She writes romantic mysteries because she loves to see justice prevail. Colleen is CEO of American Christian Fiction Writers. She lives with her husband Dave in Indiana.

From NLS/BARD/LOC:

Into the deep DBG07887

Coble, Colleen Reading time: 9 hours, 9 minutes.

Dana Hopkins. A production of CNIB.

Religious Fiction

Mystery and Detective Stories

In the untamed beauty of Michigan’s Upper Peninsula, a local scientist misses his son’s birthday party and turns up dead in Lake Superior. A radical environmental group blames a mysterious lab for the dead fish found in a remote stream. Then an Alzheimer’s patient goes missing and his home is ransacked. 2004. Unrated. Marrakesh title.

Download Into the deep DBG07887