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

Inflation: The Problems It Creates and the Policies It Requires by Arthur M. Okun, Henry H. Fowler, and Milton Gilbert

This book is a transcription of a lecture series on inflation given at New York University back in 1969 by speakers Arthur Okun, Henry Fowler and Milton Gilbert. These three men, all important "experts" in their day on managing the economy, and all speaking with great confidence in the correctness of their policy prescriptions, had no idea how wrong they would be--about everything. As a result, this book indirectly teaches humility, and it once again teaches how incredibly useful it is to read books outside of the time period in which they were written. Each speaker holds forth on various orthodox economic ideas of that era: presumed trade-offs between inflation and unemployment, how to "fine-tune" the economy, and (most hilariously) the critical importance of gold as the foundation of the international monetary system.  Today, we can look back on these confidently-given speeches with rich irony, knowing that in less than a year, the 1970s would dunk on all three sp...
Read more

Merchants of Grain by Dan Norman

[Recommended for investing geeks and students of power structures. Everyone else can take a pass.] Certain industries or companies need to be "visible" and in the public eye. See, for example, story stocks like Nvidia, or branded consumer products companies (which require name recognition and habit formation in order to sell product), or any company run by a celebrity CEO. Think of this as one level of visibility. Note also: any publicly traded company--even if it has a name or a CEO nobody's ever heard of--must file financial reports and other filings. To have access to public equity markets and have your stock trade on an exchange, your company has to "come in and register" (to borrow the phrase from incompetent SEC Commissioner Gary Gensler), and this means putting a lot of information about your business out in the open. Now anybody can look at your filings, see your profitability metrics, see who your managers and directors and large shareholders are, and s...
Read more

The Swiss Family Robinson by Johann R. Wyss

Reading this famous book opens a window into the cultural and ethical milieu of early 19th century Europe. We see an idealized family facing severe challenges in an unknown and exotic part of the world, and doing so without despair or pessimism. To a modern reader, the Robinson family might resemble  The Cosby Show : the father comes across as a bit of a pedant, the children speak in complete and grammatically-correct sentences [1] , and the family solves problems in the book-chapter equivalent of a 30 minute TV segment. Other dubious elements of the story might amuse the adult reader: see for example their island's impossible array of wildlife and botany, or the family's ability to MacGyver almost anything out of anything. And yet one can easily see how this would be a wonderful and ethically nutritious story for a young person to read (or have read to him or her), as it conveys a range of non-cynical messages that are rapidly disappearing from the modern era: on not being id...
Read more