Books: Forest Fighter

ROBERT ROGERS OF THE RANGERS (299 pp.)—John R. Cuneo—Oxford ($6).

When TV next manages to turn a folk hero into a public nuisance, by marinating his name in an indelible jingle and spreading his face, printed on T-shirts, across millions of tiny chests, there can be no more likely candidate than Robert Rogers. He was a woodsman and explorer of great skill, a brilliant military innovator, and an Indian fighter so widely feared that he was a myth before he was 30. The fact that the redoubtable French and Indian Warrior was, at one time...