I, Horatio

About the Book

This book is the first presentation of the life of Horatio Nelson to be narrated in the first person, a recounting of his life in his own words. It begins with Nelson as a young 21-year-old captain in the Caribbean and goes to his death at the Battle of Trafalgar. Along the way his experiences in carrying out the vision of his duty in the Caribbean, Corsica, Tenerife, the Battle of Cape St. Vincent, the Nile, Copenhagen, and Trafalgar cost him his eye, his right arm, and ultimately his life, all because he was blessed and cursed with a nature that was blind to the spectre of failure and deaf to anything other than the call of duty, the clamour of battle, and victory. He was also a mortal man whose attraction to women brought pleasure, frustration, infatuation, and ultimately lifelong satisfaction. This is his story as he would tell it.

About the Author

Donald Tortorice is a retired attorney and law professor. For more than two decades he was a partner in Duane Morris, LLP, an international law firm headquartered in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, and for thirteen years he taught as a professor at the Law School of the College of William & Mary in Williamsburg, Virginia. He also taught as a visiting professor at the Dickinson law school of Penn State University, the University of San Diego, and the University of Richmond. Don is an honors graduate of the University of Texas at Austin and the Law school of the University of California at Berkeley. At Texas, he began a fifty-year fascination and study of the life of Admiral Horatio Nelson, which has culminated in this book. He is also the author of The Modern Rules of Order and several law texts in the field of health law and bioethics. I, Horatio is his first novel. Prior to law school he served for five years as a US naval officer, serving initially aboard a destroyer named the USS John W. Thomason in the Pacific. In 1966–67, he commanded a swift boat in Vietnam, where he was awarded the individual Cross of Gallantry by the Republic of South Vietnam. He completed his naval career as an Assistant Professor of Naval Science at Yale University. Don currently resides in Pinehurst, North Carolina, where he plays golf, reads, writes, and travels frequently to visit members of his family in California.