I'm going through American historian David Hackett Fisher's (who won the Pulitzer for Washington's Crossing) mammoth biography of explorer Samuel de Champlain.

Considering the wide praise it got from French, Québécois, Canadian and American, and even native people historians alike, it's unsurprisingly excellent - especially interesting for Fisher's dual mastery of French history and the New England and English details (not that our historians overlook this, but Fisher has a more researched and deeper grasp of American history to contribute, and with that he's better placed to offer meaningful comparisons between the English and French approaches. His overview of French politics and religious issues in the period, clearly written for anglophones less familiar with that, is also extremely good and limpid.

For now I'm just regretting a bit my decision, considering the topic is essentially one of French history, not to have bought the book in the French translation that was done apparently with great care by one of our own leading historians. In part that's because it's harder for me to situate myself in the writings of Champlain Fisher constantly refers to when they appear in modern English translation (I was a little disappointed the excerpts of Champlain's writings are the ones Fisher chose not to give the French original for in his footnotes), in part it's because Fisher mixes liberally the rather different historical nomenclatures for New France used by Anglo-Canadians and French Canadian historians - often very different beside the fact the English names are purely anachronistic, which gets me lost at times (I'm still wondering what could motivate an historian to use Champlain's French names of places in Maine, while his readers know them only by their later English translations (using Champlain's maps) while at the same time for features in French Acadia he uses the much later post-conquest English names, wholly different from the French. He's the only Historian I know who calls the French settlement of Port-Royal Annapolis Royal.)

The rest is more pet peeves, like annoyance at the fact the perfectly bilingual Fisher is weirdly ignoring on and off the grammatical value of French articles he uses, which makes for clunky reading (eg: he writes - of the "La Seigneurie de Tadoussac" instead of writing "of the Seigneurie" and alas Fisher is also one of those historians with the habit of throwing in every two sentences foreign words with no justifiable reason, coming up with annoying "bilingual" sentences with a few of those lined up that brings absolutely nothing (what's so peculiar about an entrepôt and maisonette that you can't use the perfect equivalent English words "storehouse" and "shack", I really don't know... ironically Fisher opt often for terms coined by anglo historians after pointing out it's a misleading fit for the original French. Go figure...). This always reeks for me of either scholarly snobism or some weird over enthusiasm on his part to provide foreign color when it's not pertinent, which just makes the reading clunkier. An editor should probably have smoothed that stuff out.

But aside from all those minor language issues I'm not yet used to merely 15% into the book, it's an excellent read so far.

Next this month might be The Goldfinch, if I have time.