Rating: 
Summary: Snow Job
Review: This reminds me a little of the guilty feeling I had when I was in school and wrote book reports without having read the book. In the case of Robert Leckie's "A Few Acres of Snow," I have waded through about a third of the book so far and, while I plan to push through to the end, I don't need to wait any longer to record my disappointment.The comments of other unhappy readers, which I now wish I had read before buying this volume, are right on the money. In particular, the two chapters on the career of Columbus before and after "the discovery" can only be considered as unabashed padding. My English composition students would suffer a heavy penalty for similar irrelevance. Equally disturbing is the jumbled chronology, with some sentences beginning in the 17th century and ending in the 20th. Other flaws range from the mildly bothersome to the truly annoying. As for the scholarship, let me just say that if I want a good historical yarn with occasional grains of truth mixed in, I prefer the narratives of Allan W. Eckert. In the area of the French and Indian War, Eckert's "Wilderness Empire" is a better read than Leckie's book, though it only covers the last of the four wars. For a more scholarly and historically accurate approach, I look forward to reading Fred Anderson's "Crucible of War: The Seven Years' War and the Fate of British Empire in North America, 1754-1766."
Rating: 
Summary: Poor Account of the Colonial Wars
Review: This work by Robert Leckie was very disappointing. Leckie has written many other books on military history with mixed results. Overall, I felt this book is poorly edited and poorly written by a man who, as is noted by many others here, is not at all objective in his analysis. Simply put, this is not good history. While Leckie attempts to give a broad overview of the history of the settlement of the North American continent, and the bloody conflict that ensued between the French, English, and native tribes, the book trips up repeatedly. The book begins with an account of Christopher Columbus' discovery of the New World, then jumps nearly a century later detailing Samuel D'Champlaign's expedition to found Quebec. The book continues this jumping around, often repeating entire passages, shunning any sense of chronology, and often employing extremely biased and unprofessional personal opinions as historical fact. We also get almost nothing about the Indian, or even the British, view of events. What we do get is a simplistic portrayal of the Indian tribes as violent and childish savages which negates the significant role and contributions they made during these times. Again, this one-sidedness seems to devalue the effectiveness of the book as history. Leckie's books are filled with many narrative passages carried over from his days as a historical fiction writer. Here the anecdotal moments tend to distract from what should have been an accurate account of the turbulent history of the North American Frontier, from King William's War to the Fall of Montreal in the French and Indian War. What we get instead is sloppy history. This book has a few moments of interest, but there are many other books that deal with this period and it's important events far better.
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