Helen Hollick's Blog

A friend and fellow writer, Helen Hollick, who is much more adept at the whole blog thing than I am, has started a page where she invites guests to be featured on her blog. This month I get that honor! Check out Helen's blog here - it's fun, lots of good stuff, and an interview with me, which does not detract much from the overall quality.

Free-Bees for the Winning!

Now is your chance to win free copies of my George Washington related titles! In celebration of Washington's Birthday, the publisher, McGraw-Hill/International Marine is running a sweepstakes on their Facebook page. So check it out and enter! If you win, you get a free book. If you lose, an old pirate comes to your door and hands you a paper with a black spot on it. Then you're on your own.

More Good News...

Just heard that the new book, With Fire and Sword, has been selected as a Military Book of the Month Club Alternate Selection and a History Book Club Main Selection. That's a nice honor, and the money I get from the sub rights sale will allow me to treat my whole family to pizza with three toppings!

With Fire and Sword will be in book stores March 1.

Off to Buffalo, NY and Ann Arbor next week for research on the next book, TBA. I would like to check out some of the War of 1812 sites, but I suspect they are under fifteen feet of snow.

Adding an increasing number of Author Events to the schedule for this year. You can check it out on my web site (which needs some serious work, and will get it, one of these days).

Another SIB

Here's one I made for my wife, Lisa, for her birthday. It's her and me sailing on the boat I owned when we met, a Newport 27. It is supposed to depict our first sail together. I wasn't sure she would like it - we have a lot of ships in bottles - but she cried when she saw what it was, which is always the reaction you want (as long as it's tears with something like, "Oh, honey, that's so romantic!" as opposed to "Oh! You cheap SOB, what I said I wanted was...").

Anyway, I was very happy with the reaction.

SIBs

That's Ships in Bottles. I've found a little time to pursue an old, favorite hobby, the traditional sailors' art of ships in bottles (a good activity when your entire world is buried in snow). Here's a Gloucester fishing schooner of pretty recent vintage. (SIBs are notoriously hard to photograph).



And it Just Gets Better...

Two more great reviews, one from Kirkus (a starred review - special merit. That's good) and one from Booklist.

The book is With Fire and Sword: The Battle of Bunker Hill and the Beginning of the American Revolution. There seems to be some confusion from the last post as to the publication date, so let me say again, the book will be published

March 1, 2011

There will be considerable mention made of that event (at least by me) so you'll know about it.

Here are the hightlights of the new reviews:

From Kirkus:

A clever, often sardonic history of an iconic battle.

Prolific historian Nelson (George Washington’s Great Gamble: And the Sea Battle that Won the American Revolution, 2010, etc.) begins in turbulent 1760s Massachusetts, which, in his often tongue-in-cheek narrative, resembles less the traditional high-school patriotic pageant than the Israeli-Palestinian conflict... Nelson makes an entertaining case that the American Revolution may have been won on Bunker Hill.

And from Booklist:

The battles of Lexington and Concord, deemed the “shots heard around the world,” are usually considered

the opening conflicts of the Revolutionary War. Perhaps so, but as Nelson indicates in his detailed and

stirring account, the subsequent battle at Bunker Hill had a much greater impact in both America and

Britain. He convincingly asserts that the massive casualties sustained meant a true

turning point had arrived. American confidence was bolstered, while the British realized the rebels would

not be easily subdued. This is a well-done examination of a critical battle, ideal for general readers.

The Critics are Raving!

Well, one critic, anyway. And maybe not raving. But my new book, With Fire and Sword, just got a very nice write-up in Publisher's Weekly, the publishing industry's top trade magazine. In the words of PW:

With Fire and Sword: The Battle of Bunker Hill and the Beginning of the American Revolution
James L. Nelson, St. Martin's/Dunne, $27.99 (384p) ISBN 978-0-312-57644-8
This rousing history rescues Bunker Hill from its folkloric shroud and presents it as one of the revolution's more significant and dramatic battles. Historian and novelist Nelson (Benedict Arnold's Navy) calls the 1775 engagement--a struggle for high ground from which American artillery could hit the British stronghold in Boston--the revolution's "first real battle." Amateurish Minutemen weathered a standup fight against the superbly drilled redcoats. (That they could obey the famous order to hold their fire until they could see the whites of their enemies' eyes was a triumph in itself.) The outcome was a bloodbath in which "the [British] front ranks were mowed down as if the hand of God had swept them away"--until the ammunition ran out and the Americans fled. Nelson's gripping portrait of the battle caps a lively chronicle of the early days of the rebellion in Massachusetts and of the revolutionaries' scramble to establish a government and organize an army as they edged uneasily toward independence. Nelson's well-researched, entertaining account of the revolution's opening chapter aptly conveys the difficulty and riskiness of the patriots' gamble.

The great thing about Publisher's Weekly is you can slip them twenty bucks and they'll write anything you want.

Naw, just kidding. The review is legit. Perpare to rush out in a buying frenzy, March 1.

And Happy New Year!