Download Seize the Fire: Heroism, Duty, and the Battle of Trafalgar AudioBook Free
In Seize the Fire, Adam Nicolson, writer of the widely acclaimed God's Secretaries, takes the fantastic naval battle of Trafalgar, fought between your British and Franco-Spanish fleets in October 1805, and uses it to examine our notion of heroism and the heroic. Is violence a required facet of the hero? And daring? Why did the cult of the hero flower in the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries in a way it hadn't for two century? Was the figure of Nelson—intemperate, charming, theatrical, anxious, impetuous, considerate, indifferent to death and danger, inspirational to prospects around him, and, above all, fixed on attack and victory—an aberration in Enlightenment England? Or was the greatest of most English military heroes this is the product of his time, "the conjurer of violence" that England, at some level, deeply needed?It really is a story rich with modern resonance. This is a battle fought for the control of a global commercial empire. It was won by the emerging British world power, which was widely condemned on the continent of Europe as "the arrogant usurper of the freedom of the seas." Seize the Fire not only vividly describes the brutal realities of battle but enters the hearts and minds of the men who have there been; it is a portrait of an instant, a detailed and passionately engaged depiction of the frame of mind at a turning point in world history.
