Another book to add to the pile next to the couch. But this one, I think I must read…Ghost Empire: How the French Almost Conquered North America, reviewed in that link in the Toronto Globe and Mail.
In Ghost Empire, Philip Marchand’s new book about the voyages of the great and peculiar 17th-century French explorer Robert de La Salle, the author doesn’t tell us much that is novel about La Salle. But in recounting the daring explorer’s epic wanderings, Marchand manages to compose an amazingly fresh, surprising take on North American history, French Canada, Catholicism and the author himself, a faintly quixotic character, bookish, erudite and appealing.
Ghost Empire is part history, part travelogue, part memoir and part philosophical meditation on the Catholic religion, modernity and the ironies of progress. The historical narrative follows La Salle on his explorations up the St. Lawrence, through the Great Lakes to the Great Plains, and down the Mississippi to the Gulf of Mexico.
…
Marchand’s interest in La Salle isn’t a passing fancy, a book-packaging ploy. By race and religion, he finds himself linked to La Salle, and La Salle’s vast empire, now almost forgotten, is to Marchand an image of the vast, ghostly edifice of the church in the modern world. And this church, Marchand says, in one of those stunning moments of clarity, is not an intellectual system (as modern scholars would have it) but the Body of Christ. As Marchand himself admits, this is not a point of view generally shared even in French Canada these days.
Chapters (big Canadian chain) link
It’s on Amazon US, but that claims a 3-5 weeks delivery.
Read Previous Post