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Joseph Banks
- Author
- Patrick O’Brian
- Narrator
- Richard Attlee
- Publisher
- HarperCollins Publishers
- Publish Date
- 26 March 2026
- Run Time
- 15 hours 39 minutes
- Format
- x-book®
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What to expect
Botanist, explorer, President of the Royal Society and one of Australia’s founding fathers.
Sir Joseph Banks was among the most influential figures of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. As a young man he accompanied Captain Cook on his voyage of discovery to Australia, in later years he was instrumental in establishing Kew Gardens as the greatest botanical centre in the world and he knew just about everybody who mattered in the scientific circles of the time.
Patrick O'Brian's masterly biography draws on much hitherto unpublished material. Far from being the colossus of science traditionally imagined, Joseph Banks emerges here as a warm-hearted enthusiast whose legacy survives not only in the record of his botanizing in the South Seas but in the development of the Australian continent and in the tenor and tradition of subsequent scientific inquiry.
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Details
- Author
- Patrick O’Brian
- Narrator
- Richard Attlee
- Duration
- 15 hours 39 minutes
- Release Date
- 26 March 2026
- ISBN
- 9780008529574
- Format
- x-book®
- Publisher
- HarperCollins Publishers
- Genre
- Biography: adventurers and explorers, Biography: historical, political and military, Botany and plant sciences, Australasian and Pacific history, General and world history
Synopsis
Botanist, explorer, President of the Royal Society and one of Australia’s founding fathers. Sir Joseph Banks was among the most influential figures of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. As a young man he accompanied Captain Cook on his voyage of discovery to Australia, in later years he was instrumental in establishing Kew Gardens as the greatest botanical centre in the world and he knew just about everybody who mattered in the scientific circles of the time. Patrick O'Brian's masterly biography draws on much hitherto unpublished material. Far from being the colossus of science traditionally imagined, Joseph Banks emerges here as a warm-hearted enthusiast whose legacy survives not only in the record of his botanizing in the South Seas but in the development of the Australian continent and in the tenor and tradition of subsequent scientific inquiry.
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