The Wordy Shipmates by Sarah Vowell
255 pages
Published 2008
Read from May 13 to May 16
Rating: ★★★½ out of 5
If I'm not mistaken, this was Vowell's first conventionally structured history book. Her books before this (which, admittedly, I haven't read -- I'm piecing this together from the internet) were collections of essays, or in the case of Assassination Vacation, something like a thematically unified travelogue. Shipmates tells the story of the Boston Puritans, rather than the more familiar pop-history figures north in Salem or south in Plymouth, largely through the eyes of John Winthrop, intermittent governor of the Massachusetts Bay Colony and author of the "city on a hill" sermon, so beloved and so wrongfully interpreted by Reagan. The intent is partly to trace the origins of one strain of American exceptionalism in popular ideology, but that thread gets lost somewhat in the flow of Puritan infighting and banishments and the ugliness of the Pequot War.
Overall, Shipmates doesn't quite hang together quite as well as Unfamiliar Fishes and Lafayette in the Somewhat United States. It's still an enjoyable read, but with the benefit of the hindsight of those two later books, it seems like Vowell had yet to finalize her voice in this period. It isn't quite so snarky, not quite so funny, not quite so zippy. It also doesn't feel as informative as those two volumes -- possibly because I've covered so much related material, both recently (in Stacy Schiff's The Witches) as well as many years ago, in college history courses.
No comments:
Post a Comment