Skip to main content

Northwest Passage by Kenneth Roberts

Recommended only to readers deeply interested in the French and Indian War. Otherwise an interesting and competent historical fiction best-seller from 1937, which in its day was the second best-selling book behind Gone With the Wind, which came out just the year before. See also the 1940 film with Spencer Tracy starring as Major Rogers, a near-godlike leader of men in the North American bush, but a deeply flawed and narcissistically grandiose failure everywhere else in his life.

Note/quotes:
* "Never tell people what you really think, if it's at all different from what they think, because it sets 'em against you on general principles."

* "He ain't educated at all! He don't even know why Indians cry when they're drunk!" McNott mocking the ivory tower educated Langdon Towne. 

* Interesting (or depressing) to see Wikipedia criticize the author for insufficient wokeism: alleging anti-semitism, not anti-racist enough, etc. Depending on your taste you can use this as a substantial cue for whether you should or should not read this book.

* Note also that by "retrospective bigoteering"--criticizing a prior generation for failing to meet today's (assumed) more enlightened standards--is really an error of solipsism: unless society is perfected already (which, uh, clearly it is not) then future eras will look back on us and find us guilty of these same bigotries by their standards.

* The first half of the book is well-paced: the infamous raid on the village of St. Francis is quite well told and really moves the reader along. And then the escape, the ambush, getting back with almost no food, the astounding leadership of M Rogers to get the men home; it all makes for good reading. 

* Being blind to flaws of those who we see as our heroes: narrator Langdon Towne sees the first clues that Major Rogers isn't as perfect as Towne wants wants him to be. "This was a dreadful creature... and yet my admiration for him still lived." Towne struggles to disabuse himself of his first impression of him as a hero.

* The second half of the novel (the London period) is written in a notably different style, kind of a rip-off of Dickens; it doesn't work as well as the first half of the book. Random plot twists, Towne "receives" a daughter via the irresponsibility of one of the characters, and there's no underlying hero's journey that compares to the high drama of the first half of the book. The story is a bit adrift here and not as compelling.

More Posts

The Stress of Life by Hans Selye

Gives a useful set of lenses for how to think about stress in all its forms and manifestations. The bulk of the book deals with stress in medical biology and human physiology, but there are applications beyond our bodies, to our lives, communities, even among civilizations. A very interesting work.  The chapter "When Scientists Disagree" by itself makes this entire book worth reading. It is an eloquent articulation of the nature of scientific debate (including implications of when scientific debate turns insulting and hostile), and the author quite humbly provides the reader *all* of the professional disagreements and contentions with his model of stress. This part of the book really sings out with humility, sincerity and a scientific rigor we seem to have lost in the postmodern era. Notes:  * General adaptation syndrome (G.A.S.): how we adapt to stressors: various shock therapies across history (fever treatments, electric shock, etc) provided improvement with no direct r...

Broken Money by Lyn Alden

Our money is broken, and the sooner we wrap our minds around the implications, the better. In Broken Money, Lyn Alden, a lucid writer and gifted teacher, offers a highly readable grand tour of monetary history: she explains the emergence of money, what makes a good or bad money, how money gradually became more and more "abstracted" away from gold, and how the modern fiat financial system evolved. Most importantly, she explains, clearly, how inflation, purposely designed into the modern system, is used as a wealth extraction tool: "...the financial system in its current form is designed in such a way that 1) the money supply continually inflates, 2) purchasing power is gradually siphoned away from savers and toward arbitrageurs who sit near the source of money creation, 3) the system rewards large and well connected entities at the cost of small and poorly connected entities, 4) liabilities gradually shift from the private sector to the public sector to keep the system f...

The Power of Your Subconscious Mind by Joseph Murphy

This is a blatantly repetitive and poorly-organized book, and yet it's still highly useful: filled with good tactics and reminders to observe and control your thinking--and more importantly, to be attentive to the implications of your thinking. Thoughts are things! How you think and the beliefs you hold play an enormous role in your reality. And so, despite its flaws, I think The Power of Your Subconscious Mind is still worthwhile. Think of it as a book-length practice of autosuggestion, or even a sort of extended mantra. The book's repetitiveness then becomes a benefit: it helps you practice and build good mental habits, it gives you plenty of examples of affirmations and mental scripts to apply to various life situations, and so on. A minor warning: if you consider NLP , autosuggestion or visualization and affirmation techniques to be useless woo-woo silliness, do not read this book. It's not for you. [A quick  affiliate link to readers to the book here . You ca...