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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.

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