This is a new edition of the work formerly entitled "Persons, Animals, Ships and Cannon in the Aubrey-Maturin Sea Novels of Patrick O'Brian". The first edition was a bit rough around the edges, but this one is much more polished. Many errors have been corrected, material has been added on the novels and fragments published after the first edition went to press, and there is now an interesting biographical article on O'Brian himself. Another improvement is a key to abbreviations at the foot of every second page, so you no longer have to scratch your head trying to remember what TGS or WDS stand for.
The text shows evidence of a good going-over. Spelling, punctuation, and wording have been cleaned up, and some articles have been expanded; for example, there is now factual information about Lucatellus's balm, where formerly there were only citations of its several appearances in the novels. Some minor errors remain, though: for example, there is no entry for HMS Goliah, which occurs as such (rather than as Goliath) in some editions of "HMS Surprise".
As before, Brown's notes about the correspondence of fact and fiction are among the best things in the book. He also does a commendable job of sorting out, as far as possible, the tangled and often contradictory histories of the major characters. (It's said that even Homer nods; and at times O'Brian seems to have been fast asleep.)
As in the first edition, Brown seems determined to catalog every named entity in the novels, even those the reader might be expected to have general knowledge of, such as Luke the evangelist, Jesus, and, for that matter, God. This is commendable thoroughness, but one feels that a line might have been drawn somewhere.
On the other hand, I don't quarrel with the inclusion of minor figures. When a character appears only once, it's sometimes nice to be able to confirm that. Even an entry like "Grace, Your", although it appears silly at first (it is based on something said to an anonymous person), has some value when the author explains what rank the addressee might have.
The book is attractively and durably bound in glossy, color-printed hard covers. Despite the steep price, O'Brian fanatics will want to have it.