If you don’t quite feel like you’re actually on the voyage with those brave and foolhardy young men, you certainly feel as if you’re learning of their accounts at the famous Court Martial of the young Lieutenant who led them to glory at first and ignominy later.

For example, Nathaniel Philbrick in Sea of Glory makes meticulous use of authoritative primary and secondary accounts of the voyage of the great US Exploring Expedition of 1838-42 to infuse the text and enthuse his readers.

In the best cases this narrative is based tightly on the protagonists’ letters and diaries, as well as other surviving historic documents of the time. They posses the narrative skills to draw us into the lives of the characters by adding metaphorical flesh to their existence via comparison to current society. The best authors of historical non-fiction do more than provide the reader with facts. …I ask you to pass legislation to prohibit the most egregious abuses of medical research – human cloning in all its forms – creating or implanting embryos for experiments, creating human-animal hybrids…Human life is a gift from our creator… Henri-Martin de la Martinière, Letter to the Paris Medical Faculty, 1667 To allow foreign blood to enter one’s veins…is to bring about a bloodbath, a most inhuman remedy will attract the ire of God.

In such brutal and dynastic times, the lives of the rich and powerful depended on the constant favor of the throne and the poor lived at the whim of the rich and powerful

Blood Work by Holly Tucker