La Salle : Explorer of the North American Frontier

Rating:
Summary: Dramatic and exciting. It would make a great movie.
Review: A lot of people know that La Salle discovered the mouth of the Mississippi in 1682. Would they know that was probably his easiest trip? Anka Muhlstein gives you an intimate experience of real life in French America of the 1670s. Priests, civil administrators, trappers, and explorers fighting each other fiercely but living in peace with the Indians. Frenchmen in bark canoes with skate blades on the keel racing down a frozen river. It's the story about mosquitos, Iroquois attacks, shipwrecks, desertions and treachery and about the man who astonished both Indian and Frenchman with his perserverence and adaptation to each reverse and travail. This history reads like a good novel and would make a great movie.

Rating:
Summary: amazing story
Review: This was a very readable account of LaSalle's journeys. It's truly amazing the conditions that people could survive back then as a matter of course. The language seems stilted sometimes, I believe because it was translated from French, but there is also an interesting slant, in that this is a european writing about our country, and our neighbor to the north. Keep an atlas handy to help track the story, and be prepared to be impressed. There is just enough well-researched information to bring the story alive, but not get too bogged down.

Rating:
Summary: amazing story
Review: This was a very readable account of LaSalle's journeys. It's truly amazing the conditions that people could survive back then as a matter of course. The language seems stilted sometimes, I believe because it was translated from French, but there is also an interesting slant, in that this is a european writing about our country, and our neighbor to the north. Keep an atlas handy to help track the story, and be prepared to be impressed. There is just enough well-researched information to bring the story alive, but not get too bogged down.

Rating:
Summary: Very Credible
Review: Well written and well documented, this book justifies France's North American claims like no other has. It is a very compelling account of one of North America's greatest explorers.