Voyage to the First of December
by Henry Carlisle
32 Members (3.75)
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"Henry Carlisle has done a superb job. Voyage to the First of December has true distinction . A story that has long lain buried in the annals of the American Navy is the record of the only alleged mutiny-an abortive one at that-in our country's naval history . the story is told with close adherence to the records, but using the novelist's license to probe into the psychology of the actors in this drama, and to fill in the tantalizing spaces between the spare lines of fact."-The Wall Street show more Journal Drawn from the facts of a notorious episode in U.S. naval history, the Somers Mutiny Affair of 1842, Carlisle has crafted a stunning novel in the tradition of great stories of the sea. The story of the conflict between eighteen-year-old Midshipman Philip Spencer, son of President Tyler's Secretary of War, and the man of necessities, Alexander Slidell Mackenzie, commander of the Somers, provides an existential excursion to the center of a tragedy in our past which brilliantly illuminates the present. On the first of December in 1842, Philip Spencer was hanged at sea along with two sailors, the three having been charged with leading a conspiracy to capture their ship, the brig of war Somers. Voyage to the First of December re-creates this controversial incident through the journal of the ship's surgeon. Was there a real mutiny which nothing less than execution could check-or had the officers acted in panic, the commander for perhaps darker reasons? What happened at sea that the court-martial chose to overlook? Voyage to the First of December effortlessly unites the taste of the sea with the relentless drama of men sitting in judgment of one another; a conflict between authority and rebellion, and ultimately one man's quest for meaning. show lessTags
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11+ Works 98 Members
Henry Carlisle was born in 1926. He began his publishing career in New York as an editor at Knopf in 1954. He wrote several novels including Voyage to the First of December, The Idealists, The Jonah Man, The Somers Mutiny, and The Contract. He was elected President of PEN America in 1976. He died of complications from pneumonia on July 12, 2011 at show more the age of 84. (Bowker Author Biography) show less
Classifications
- Genres
- Fiction and Literature, General Fiction, Historical Fiction
- DDC/MDS
- 813.5 — Literature & rhetoric American literature in English American fiction in English 1900-1999
- LCC
- PZ4 .C2828 — Language and Literature Fiction and juvenile belles lettres Fiction and juvenile belles lettres Fiction in English
- BISAC
Statistics
- Members
- 32
- Popularity
- 876,500
- Rating
- (3.75)
- Languages
- English
- Media
- Paper
- ISBNs
- 6
- ASINs
- 3
