Description

An amazing yet little-known figure in United States background, the French explorer and mapmaker Samuel de Champlain was the topic of a recently available best-selling biography by historian David Hackett Fischer. The Order of Good Cheer, a very readable book by master storyteller Bill Gaston, provides a beautifully tinted, fictionalized portrait of Champlain, in addition to a window into Canadian culture present and past. In 1607, Champlain and his buddies fought to determine a French colony on foreign land while preventing scurvy. Divided by the width of the region and precisely 400 years is 21st-century blue-collar employee Andrew Winslow and his buddies, whose metropolitan landscape is threatened by encroaching financial and ecological catastrophe.