John Paul Jones: Sailor, Hero, Father of the American Navy » (Reprint)

Evan Thomas is Assistant Managing Editor of Newsweek in Washington, D.C. He is the author of The Wise Men(with Walter Isaacson); The Man to See: Edward Bennett Williams, Ultimate Insider; and The Very Best Men -- Four Who Dared: The Early Years of the CIA. He lives in Washington, D.C., with his wife and two daughters.

John Paul Jones, at sea and in the heat of battle, was the great American hero of the Age of Sail. He was to history what Patrick O'Brian's Jack Aubrey and C. S. Forester's Horatio Hornblower are to fiction. Ruthless, indomitable, clever; he vowed to sail, as he put it, "in harm's way."

The New York Times

As Mr. Thomas tracks the man born John Paul (he added the Jones to escape punishment for a deadly fight) from the Atlantic to France and the British Isles, he displays ardent interest in sail appeal. Mr. Thomas knows that futtocks are ribbing in a ship's frame, and that Jones fought in "the dumpy Bonhomme Richard, with her antiquated high poop deck." And he ably captures the slow, mounting terror of battle at sea. — Janet Maslin