Northwest Passage
Told through the eyes of primary character Langdon Towne, much of this novel centers around the exploits and character of Robert Rogers, the leader of Rogers' Rangers, who were a colonial force fighting with the British during the French and Indian War. Structurally, Northwest Passage is divided into halves. The first half is a carefully researched, day-by-day recreation of the raid by Rogers' Rangers on the Indian village at Saint-Francois-du-Lac, Quebec (or Saint Francis, to the Americans troops), a settlement of the Abenakis, an American Indian tribe. The second half of the novel covers Rogers' later life in London, England and Fort Michilimackinac, Michigan. Roberts' decision to cover the novel's material in two distinct halves followed the actual trajectory of Rogers' life.
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What Hacker News says
- I love the question! I would tend toward a classic, non-digital gift.
Some ideas:
An Aerobie (like a Frisbee but goes farther and requires more skill)
A compass.
A Fisher Space pen.
An hourglass.
A chess set.
A nice shade hat for hiking.
A headlight/taillight set for a bicycle.
Balls for juggling.
A slide rule (if he's into math).
Northwest Passage by Kenneth Roberts (my dad read it as a boy, then I read it, then my son read it)
A harmonica.
A backgammon set.
A video drone (if you have a lot of money to spend -- I would have loved one of those as a kid)
- Looking at my GoodReads favorites that qualify as classics, these are the ones that I enjoyed the most:
Also, if you're reading Kafka, In the Penal Colony is a short story I enjoyed that I don't see mentioned much.- Anything by Jack London - Anything by Ernest Hemingway - *One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich* by Solzhenitsyn - *The Fixer* by Barnard Malamud - *Northwest Passage* by Kenneth Roberts - *To Kill a Mockingbird* by Harper Lee - Anything by Nikolai Gogol - Short stories by Guy de Maupassant - Most of John Steinbeck's works - *Lord of the Flies* by William Golding - *The Great Gatsby* F. Scott Fitzgerald
