The Wordy Shipmates
by Sarah Vowell
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Book Reviews of The Wordy Shipmates
Book Review: Vowell Is A Historian's John Stewart
Summary: 5 Stars
Witty, droll, and insightful, she took on the early Massachusetts Bay Colony--the Puritans who settled Masschutsetts Bay--Salem, Boston, Cambridge, etcetera ten years after Pilgrims landed on Plymouth Rock--but puts what they wrote and did in the context of their time and what occurred before and after: from John Wycliffe's fourteen century English translation of the Bible to the present, including Thanksgiving episodes in Happy Days and President Bush's justification for invading Iraq.
Vowell had a lively bunch to work with: Winthrop, Roger Williams, Anne Hutchinson, John Cotton, and a score of others, complex characters all. She praises them for courage, perseverance, and rectitude but shows their failings as well, including a great deal of hypocrisy and cruelty, especially towards Native Americans. However, The Wordy Shipmates is not some liberal diatribe against these mythical icons. Vowell acknowledges the great debt she and we owe them--from free speech to civil rights--and freely confesses she likes them and would love to have the bunch over for a lively if contentious Thanksgiving dinner.
Some disclaimers are in order. First, to appreciate this excellent work, one must relax and get into Vowell's mind. Though enlightening, this book was written to entertain. Don't buy it if you are looking for some score to settle. It's too complex and balanced for that. Secondly, prepare yourself for its lack of chapters. Every few pages has a break set off with an oversized initial capital--a place to put the book down for dinner--but otherwise it's a 248 page essay. But that adds to the experience. The one suggestion I make is the book could be improved with an index, which would allow the reader to revisit favorite passages without rereading the entire book (an index would not assist the midnight student doing a last minute term paper--this is not a reference book.
Book Review: Don't bother. More tangents than a Geometry textbook
Summary: 1 Stars
Don't bother with Sarah Vowell's Wordy Shipmates.
I confess that I didn't buy this book because I'm particularly interested in the Puritans of either the Mayflower (Plymouth) or the later Arbella (Boston). I bought it because I love watching Jon Stewart on the Daily Show, and he clearly loves Sarah Vowell and her humor, and he strongly endorsed her writing.
I read it cover to cover over the last week. Ms. Vowell's tangential writing style amuses for the first few pages, and then just drains your ability to focus on her vaguely-conceived and poorly-organized thesis. She finally gets on topic around page 27, with the preceding 26pp discussing Thanksgiving plays by her kids, along with lengthy descriptions of outdated TV show Thanksgiving episodes from Happy Days, Mr Ed, the Brady Bunch, and others.
I was born and raised in New England, and like all of us went on all the school trips to Plymouth Rock, Boston, and Salem. The pilgrims can be a really interesting topic, and certainly there are parallels and differences with modern Christianity and politics. But Ms. Vowell spends much too much time much time discussing at length her interpretation of these connections with the contemporary Evangelicals, Ron Paul, and Ronald Reagan. This book would have been so much better with a little more research on the separatist and nonseparating Puritans and a little less time elucidating obvious parallels. Of all the many players in the book, only Winthrop, Williams, and Hutchinson are given solid psychological portraits.
Overall, I'd decribe this book as trying a little too hard to be funny, trying a little to hard to be hip and relevant, with shoddy research and lack of original thought. Save your $$$.
Book Review: Entertaining and Informative
Summary: 4 Stars
Sarah Vowell's The Wordy Shipmates takes on the subject of early New England history with an insightful and sometimes amusing bent that makes it an easygoing and fun read. It's an accessible and cool book, a Gen Xer's take on how the puritan culture of seventeenth century Massachusetts and its neighbors still continues to inform our American mindset.
Shipmates takes us through the story of John Winthrop, a puritan minister who traveled to New England in 1630 aboard the ship Arbella with a group of true believers and a dream of creating a "city upon a hill" in the New World, a vision of America that we as a nation still espouse to this day. Along with Winthrop, Vowell includes several other prominent figures from the time: Roger Williams, founder of Rhode Island, banished from the Massachusetts Bay Colony for his outspoken arguments for the freedom of religion and the separation of church and state, Anne Hutchinson, a puritan woman gifted with a sharp legal mind and an even sharper tongue, as well as the Pequot and Narragansett Indians, natives who were forced to make room for the expanding European settlements.
With wit and an armchair style that makes the subject matter engaging and interesting, Vowell draws relevant parallels between the Massachusetts Bay Colony's seal with its picture of a Native American holding a banner that reads "Come Over and Help Us" and our current national policy of "helping" foreign, sovereign nations with military intervention. The writing is smart, its thesis timely without being preachy. Both entertaining and informative, The Wordy Shipmates is an interesting little primer on the origins of American political philosophy.
Book Review: Sarah Vowell Tours Proudly Presents: Pilgrims!
Summary: 3 Stars
Sarah Vowell's audio performances never fail to entertain, whether on This American Life or in the audio version of one of her own books, such as Assassination Vacation. I can't say as much for her work in its written form. While Vowell packs her books with interesting information, they tend to lack the voice that Vowell might fill in with, well, her actual voice. Snark does abound in The Wordy Shipmates, a book that recounts the first years of the Massachussetts Bay Colony; however, archival records dominate the text. Quotations, often in block form, take up at least half of every page, leaving me feel as if I might as well have gone directly to the primary source and read the papers of Roger Williams and John Winthrop for myself.
The book has made me more informed about the goings-on of 17th-century America. Vowell acts as a knowledgeable tour guide who has the salacious details. She's been on enough museum tours to know how it should be done. But, on page, at least, this tour seems, well, wordy. I'm not sure what Vowell wants to impart unto her readers. The book could be a primer on Puritan New England, but it doesn't ask to be taken seriously as an academic text. And, while Vowell keeps her tour funny, she spends too much time in facts to classify The Wordy Shipmates as humor. Meanwhile, she indicates several parallels between Puritan New England and modern America, but does not explore them enough to make a cohesive thesis. Altogether, The Wordy Shipmates offers pleasant-enough chitchat about an area of American history that often gets glossed-over, but I wish I'd sprung for the audiobook.
Book Review: Very funny
Summary: 4 Stars
I can't summarize this book effectively, so I'm just going to quote from the back:
"To this day, Americans think of themselves as a Puritan nation, but Vowell investigates what that means - and what it should mean. Who were these people who are considered the political and spiritual and moral ancestors of our nation? What was this great enterprise all about? What Vowell discovers is something far different from their uptight shoe-buckles-and-corn reputation. The people she finds are highly literate, deeply principled, and surprisingly feisty. Their story is filled with pamphlet feuds, witty courtroom dramas, and bloody vengeance."
And so on. Let me say that this book is absolutely hilarious. I found myself laughing regularly throughout Vowell's journey through Puritan history. She makes history that is normally dull and confusing (even for me, who loves history) into a riot of a book that I just wanted to keep reading. She also relates the past to the present and shows us a fair amount of horrifying examples where history repeats itself - or worse, when American presidents take out bits and pieces of Puritan speeches and ignore the important bits about being good to your fellow citizens. I'm not sure the book has potential for being read and understood a hundred years from now given the pop culture jokes, but it's certainly amusing now.
Sarah Vowell does a brilliant job of showing us how history is relevant while keeping us entertained and informed. I'd wholeheartedly recommend this one.