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Book Reviews Edited by Patrice Proulx Book Reviews History, Culture, and Politics HEIDENREICH, CONRAD E. and K. JANET RITCH, eds. Samuel de Champlain before 1604: Des Sauvages and Other Documents Relating to the Period. Co-published. Toronto: The Champlain Society and Montreal & Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2010. Pp. 336. ISBN 978-0-7735-3757-6. For courses on the history of the French in North America, Conrad E. Heidenreich and K. Janet Ritch’s Samuel de Champlain before 1604: Des Sauvages and Other Documents Relating to the Period proves to be an excellent English-language source on the early documents related to Champlain’s explorations and role as founding father. According to the authors, previous efforts to document Champlain’s work have been hampered by poor or incomplete translations of his writings: “Rather than leaving Champlain’s ambiguities, an effort was made to guess what he was trying to say, and rather than leaving his ‘laboured pedestrian style,’ an effort was made to make it more intelligible to a modern reader” (xii). Thus, in celebration of the four hundredth anniversary of the founding of Québec, Heidenreich and Ritch set out to produce a new edition of Champlain’s first book, Des Sauvages, as well as related documents from the same time period, in order to correct the numerous errors found in previous publications: Where possible, each document has been newly translated, incorporating the latest research on Champlain, New France, and the Native societies he observed that has been done since the original Champlain Society edition of 1922. Also included are newly discovered documents and those not previously translated. Rather than providing a review of what previous authors have written on Champlain, we base our observations Québec Studies, 57 doi:10.3828/qs.2014.13