Book reviews: Heart of the Hero | Short Walks from Bogota | In the Hour of Victory

Published on 23/02/2013 00:00

A round-up of the latest releases

Heart of the Hero

by Kari Herbert

(Saraband, £14.99) ****

The heroic age of polar exploration was also the age of “the Angel in the House”. Jo Peary (wife of Robert E) may have decided that a woman’s place was at the Pole, but by and large her peers preferred to keep the home fires burning. So, at least, it seemed. Only Eleanor Franklin actually measured up: a poet, wasting away with tuberculosis in the approved romantic style, she sent her husband John off to the Arctic from her deathbed. Most polar wives were less self-sacrificing, strong as they were in their support for their husbands. Singer Eva Nansen grew heartily sick of being patronised at receptions “so boring you could weep tears of blood”. But it had taken courage to do what she had done. Kari Herbert (daughter of Marie and Wally) knows what she’s talking about in a wonderfully diverting – and often inspiring – book.

Short Walks from Bogotá

by Tom Feiling

(Allen Lane, £20) ****

The 1990s saw a slew of first-hand accounts of the “real” Colombia, many of which made terrific (not to say terrifying) reading. Typically, the authors came on like Dantes back from the Inferno – not altogether without justification. Not so much a country as a state of chaos, Colombia was torn this way and that by warring interests: by the Farc; by brutal security forces and right-wing paramilitaries; and by the drugs cartels. Now that something like normality has been restored, how are we to comprehend Colombia? Tom Feiling’s lively travelogue takes him to more shopping malls than cocaine laboratories; more bustling bars than guerrilla encampments, introducing an extravagantly friendly and (often unaccountably) happy people.

In the Hour of Victory

by Sam Willis

(Atlantic, £25) *****

“The action … has been very severe – however, the admiral ship is dismasted and struck, as have several others, and one is on fire …” Thus Admiral Adam Duncan, on HMS Venerable at Camperdown (1797). The collection of official dispatches found by Sam Willis in the bowels of the British Library gives us the most momentous naval battles of the Napoleonic era. Written by the seafarers themselves with the whiff of salt spray and gunpowder in the air, there are reports from, among other places, St Vincent, the Nile, Copenhagen, Trafalgar and San Domingo. This book is beautifully produced, Willis sketching in the background in vivid detail while letting his commanders speak – with thrilling immediacy – for themselves.