• This community needs YOUR help today. We rely 100% on Supporting Memberships to fund our efforts. With the ever increasing fees of everything, we need help. We need more Supporting Members, today. Please invest back into this community. I will ship a few decals too in addition to all the account perks you get.



    Sign up here: https://www.muzzleloadingforum.com/account/upgrades

Christmas Book

Muzzleloading Forum

Help Support Muzzleloading Forum:

This site may earn a commission from merchant affiliate links, including eBay, Amazon, and others.
Joined
May 17, 2005
Messages
1,684
Reaction score
29
My wife and I spent Christmas with her sister and husband (and all their kids and little grandkids) down in North Carolina.

For a present they got me "Northwest Passage" by Kenneth Roberts. It's a massive tome, and a brief flip of the pages looks like it's based on Rogers' Rangers.

Has anybody here read this book and can offer any reviews and/or opinions?
 
The first part of the book involves the raid on St. Francis in Canada during the F&I war by Rogers' Rangers, the second part is about later events in the life of Robert Rogers. I expect you will enjoy it. It was quite a hit when it was first released.

A poor movie by the same name and based on the first part of the book was made, had Spencer Tracy. It's available online, maybe YouTube, I think.

Other books by Kenneth Roberts are quite readable, too.

Spence
 
I read it a long, long time ago when I was in high school. It's a very good book! I had a hard time putting it down once I got started.
 
Kenneth Roberts was considered the father of the historical novel and his research was meticulous. His work on the Arnold expedition and the Battle of Cowpens are still the standards by which others are judged. His fiction is nearly as good as first hand accounts and I can't express how much I have enjoyed reading and rereading his work. If you are a Down East native you will see some dry Yankee humor woven into the narratives too. While it's just my opinion I feel "Oliver Wiswell" made one of the most powerful anti war statements I have ever read and it's truly fascinating to read about the Revolution from the other side.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kenneth_Roberts_(author)
 
Last edited by a moderator:
Oliver Wiswell was a good one, and unique in presenting the view from the loyalist side.

One I particularly enjoyed was not actually one of his historical novels but an accumulation of the journals of several participants on Benedict Arnold's 1775 campaign against Quebec. The book is sort of the background information Roberts collected in doing his research for the historical novels, and is considered a gem by historians, I understand. It's March to Quebec. My library had it. Full of fascinating details.

Spence
 
George said:
The first part of the book involves the raid on St. Francis in Canada during the F&I war by Rogers' Rangers, the second part is about later events in the life of Robert Rogers. I expect you will enjoy it. It was quite a hit when it was first released.

A poor movie by the same name and based on the first part of the book was made, had Spencer Tracy. It's available online, maybe YouTube, I think.

Other books by Kenneth Roberts are quite readable, too.

Spence
Spence- I liked the movie in general, and it was known for its Technicolor scenery back when it was made. Those light green elf suits that all the Rangers wore though were certainly awful! You're sure right that the book was a LOT better.
 
I won a copy of the book at a fundraiser for the Arlington, VA library. It was enjoyable, though no where as easy reading as Melville's books. (few are)

I did not see the movie until after reading the book. I suspect seeing it after reading made it slightly more enjoyable since I knew where the plot was going.

When I was reading it the first time, my wife's uncle noticed it and went on and on about how it was a much better book than most gave credit. He was a retired English Professor from a big university in Colorado. He got into discussing story lines and novel construction, I just wanted to read a story about Roger's Rangers.
 
Back
Top