David Hackett Fischer - Champlain’s Dream: The European Founding of North America

International Bestseller
A New York Times Notable Book
A Globe and Mail Best Book

This book is the product of Fischers exhaustive efforts to put a human face on the legendary Father of New France. Reviewers have described Champlains Dream as the definitive biography of one of the greatest explorers of all time, and its impossible to disagree. [Fischer] succeeds brilliantly in analyzing the man and his motives. Fischer has succeeded with a balanced and insightful exploration of the internal geography of a larger-than-life figure.

The Chronicle Herald (Halifax)

Champlains Dream is a masterpiece. The work is extraordinarily well researched and the research and reference material is largely included in this edition for those who wish to delve further into the story. This is the new standard by which one must consider and study the birth and development of New France.

Canada History Book Reviews

A timely new biography Champlains Dream puts flesh and bones on the enigmatic figure who played a seminal role in the development of our half of North America. Its no small accomplishment to add something to the Champlain story, which has been told by many others. Champlains Dream puts this epic story in context, complete with intricate shading, sounds, and smells, not to mention reproductions of Champlains maps and drawings. The delights are in the details. Champlains Dream is a worthy addition to [Champlains] legacy.

The Gazette

As ruminative as it is action-filled. What Mr. Fischer has really done is to sketch a character whose virtuesprodigious curiosity, respect for other cultures, a sense of fairnesshe considered exemplary.

Wall Street Journal

A highly readable biography of Samuel de Champlain. An absorbing portrait of the man and his world.

Winnipeg Free Press

[An] absorbing and widely lauded new biography. [Champlains Dream] was written with the general reader in mind. It represents an effort to find common ground between two formerly competing historical approaches: the so-called great man focus and a more grassroots, socio-economic perspective.

Toronto Star

This biography of Champlain is the most complete that I know about. He was a mysterious, compelling figure who was at once an explorer, ethnographer, navigator, diplomat, and soldier but above all a man of courage and determination. Envisioning a world in which different peoples and races could live and mix together, his actions prefigured a new model for society. Professor Fischer has given us a truly fascinating book about a person who highly deserves this recognition.

Denis Vaugeois, co-editor of Champlain: The Birth of French America and co-author of Mapping a Continent: Historical Atlas of North America, 14921814

The definitive biography.

Denver Post

With Fischers Champlains Dream, all earlier biographies, except a few of the latest French ones, no longer serve any useful purpose. This is a massive, scholarly work, logically organized and clearly written as befits a Pulitzer Prizewinning historian. As Fischer explores Champlains life, he weaves the broad connecting theme that led to the title of the book. Champlains overarching dream was that he envisioned a new world as a place where people of different cultures could live together in amity and concord. It was his principled leadership in bringing natives and French together that enabled him to lay the foundations for this dream. Champlain was not an introspective person. He never expressed this ideal as cogent proposal in any section of his books, which is why most biographers have missed it, but a thorough reading of his writings demonstrates that Fischer is right.

Conrad Heidenreich, The Globe and Mail

Champlains Dream offers a wholly new portrait of the explorer, soldier, and sailor who was crucial to the creation of Canada.

Macleans

The career of historian David Hackett Fischer is an encouraging thing to contemplate: he just keeps getting better with every book he writes. In each successive book, his narrative drive is stronger, more supple, and more assuredand so its not surprising that his latest, Champlains Dream, is his best to date. Right from its start, the reader is gripped by Fischers passion for his subject. This is far and away the finest, most engrossing biography of Champlain ever written in English.

Open Letters, A Monthly Arts and Literature Review

David Hackett Fischer has the merit to place the work of the colonizer in the context of a civil conflict. The Catholic Champlain embodies, in the eyes of the American historian, the tolerance dear to his king Henri IV, a Protestant convert to Catholicism but promoter in France of religious concord. He had the sensibility necessary to become the pioneer of an original North American geopolitical system.

Michel Lapierre, Le Devoir

Fischer provides a splendid example not only of historical narration, but also of the ways historians can use stories of great men not as triumphal panegyrics but, rather, as prisms through which much else can be seen.

Nathan Greenfield, The Times Literary Supplement

A totally new biography of the founder of the city of Quebec. The title, Champlains Dream accurately reflects the authors thesis. Our man distinguished himself from adventurers by his vision of a new world founded on respect.

Raymond Giroux, Le Soleil

Is there a finer student of American history writing today than David Hackett Fischer? If so, I dont know who it would be. Even when he writes books of doorstop heft This plain, unadorned style is never dry or boring, in part because he so often sprinkles intriguing ideas into the narrative.

The New York Times Sunday Book Review

This is an incredibly in-depth biography full of rich detail and painstaking research. The illustrations and maps (many drawn by Champlain himself) are both helpful and visually appealing. The book is indeed a mighty tome, but one that will contribute immensely to the knowledge of a noteworthy Canadian.

Quill & Quire

A book every Canadian should own. Fischer is a real historiansomeone who knows how to go into archives and squeeze them, and doesnt push his luck when hes found a solid insight. He draws out the intricate webs of sympathies and antipathies between Champlain and the tribes of New France, and shows how men and women on both sides, exhausted by decades of pointless violence, were able to find, in their traditions, a glimpse of a common future of peace and prosperity. [Champlain] was the only explorer of new worlds, French, Spanish, Dutch, or English, who possessed such a vision of tolerance and integration. And it is a vision worth preserving.

National Post

A comprehensive, exhaustively researched, yet always lively biography. Besides narrating a life it also, as its title suggests, tells the story of Champlains vision for North America, which, Fischer maintains, was one of tolerance and humanity and remains worthy of admiration today.

The Boston Globe

David Hackett Fischer is in that ethereal category of biographers who can climb into the soul of his subject, look out of that individuals eyes, and report back on what he sees. [Fischer] delivers a marvellous read with Champlains Dream. His research is prodigious, and so is his writing talent. Fischer has made Champlain wonderfully humanand that is the greatest compliment a biographer can earn.