The Wordy Shipmates by Sarah Vowell Summary and Reviews
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Book Reviews of The Wordy Shipmates
Book Review: Not Her Best Shot
Summary: 3 Stars
Sadly, the sequel to Assassination Vacation is not posthumous, leaving lonely chicken raisers and unsuspecting American Studies majors equally irritated.Book Review: Not all Puritans were created alike
Summary: 5 Stars
Many readers will come to "The Wordy Shipmates" via the same route and reason I did: I enjoyed "Assassination Vacation." I expected the pilgrims would get the same work out as history of America's first three presidential assassinations--travelogue, history, connecting the dots along history's timeline to reveal America's growth as a nation and culture, and a dose of Vowell herself, a passionate, opinionated history geek with a penchant for irony. In "Shipmates," there is far less present day geographical travel and less of her quirky self in the narrative. What she mostly does is travel through the words of New England's founding Puritans to sort out the ideas that shaped things to come, how they did and did not play out, and to see how they reverberate today.
Vowell is right: when pilgrims come to mind, it's a big harvest feast with happy Indians. People tend to think they arrived all at the same time, and that the witch trials of Salem were on the heels of the disembarkation at Plymouth. In fact, the immigration began flowing with the Mayflower in 1620 and covered much of the 17th century which closed with the Salem trials. The Puritans were not all of one mind and belief, either. In fact, they struggled among themselves regarding the tenets of their faith, their relationship with Mother England, what New England should be and not be, and how to treat one another and the Indians. Vowell mostly focuses on the events of the 1630s, when Roger Williams was banished to the wilderness where he carved out Rhode Island, when the domineering Anne Hutchinson rattled male leaders, and when things went from "the Indians want us to help them and we'll do our best" to the Pequot War that batted clean-up on the devastation that European microbes had already wreaked, thus making way for the state of Connecticut.
I give Vowell a 5 for doing her homework, for casting out misconceptions and finding out just who the founders were, what they believed and what were their actual legacies. She is amazingly lucid given that her travels are largely intellectual among a pithy bunch. I give her a 4 for the fact that it is rendered in one long episodic essay--no chapters, no index. This does not have the bouncing-off-the-walls headiness of "Vacation," but she gets at our Americaness in a meditative but urgent way that is effective, so I'll stick with the full 5 points.
Book Review: Not as Good as Assassination Vacation But It's Still Good Vowell
Summary: 4 Stars
Customer review from the Amazon Vine™ Program (What's this?)
I really enjoy Sarah Vowell's work and I've often recommended Assassination Vacation , so I had pretty high expectations for The Wordy Shipmates.
At its core The Wordy Shipmates is a very interesting book. Vowell takes a look at a very specific time and space in American History and shines a light into many preconceived notions of the Puritans and their experience in early America.
What's missing from The Wordy Shipmates is Vowell herself. In Assassination Vacation, Vowell's own journey was the glue which held the book together. Here that kind of journey is mostly absent and so the book often gets stalled in the historical content.
That all said, it is a fascinating book and Vowell is immensely talented. My instinct though is that hearing her read this story would be more enjoyable and entertaining than reading it, and this comes from someone who rarely listens to audio books.
So if you're a Vowell fan, do check this book out, albeit with lower expectations as it's no Assassination Vacation.
Book Review: Not as engaging as previous works...
Summary: 4 Stars
I think that Sarah Vowell's writing is creative, witting and fascinating. Up until now, I have enjoyed everything written by Sarah Vowell and always look forward to her new books. But I wasn't quite as enthralled with The Wordy Shipmates. Maybe it's me, but I just couldn't get myself as stirred up about the Puritans as Vowell.
Vowell claims that "Americans have learned our history from exaggerated popular art for as long as anyone can remember." She attempts to set the record straight "about those Puritans who fall between the cracks of 1620 Plymouth and 1692 Salem, the ones who settled the Massachusetts Bay Colony and then Rhode Island." She places a special emphasis on the "words written or spoken" by Puritan leaders including John Winthrop, John Cotton, Roger Williams and Anne Hutchinson. John Winthrop's sermon, "A Model of Christian Charity" plays a major role and appears again and again. According to Vowell, this sermon is "one of the formative documents outlining the idea of America" because of the "'city upon a hill' sound bite."
Vowell is clearly smitten with the Pilgrims, their words, their ideas and their history. Unfortunately, I did not find them that engaging. She usually makes comic parallels between the history she is discussing and the present day. She still does this in spots--sometimes it's more irony than belly laughs. While visiting the Mohegan Sun Casino operated by the Mohegan tribe, Vowell muses that 17th Century sachem "Uncas would undoubtedly get a kick out of his tribe presiding over such an impressive edifice built for the sole purpose of taking white people's wampum." Or that "an America fervently devoted to the quaint goals of working together and getting along" does actually exist. "It's called Canada."
One other thing I disliked was that Vowell does not divide The Wordy Shipmates into chapters. By the end, I was glad that I stuck with this book and I still think that Vowell is an amazing talent. But I was expecting a little more.
Book Review: Not her best effort
Summary: 3 Stars
The coolest thing about the book is how Winthrop used the "City on the Hill" analogy in a sermon and how that analogy has been used throughout U.S. history to justify various stances on moral grounds. Reagan intentionally used Winthrop's allusions in many of his speeches. Kennedy, Vowell's idol, does the same. The problem with the book is that she points out a few good things about the Puritans, but the climax or what she writes most about is the failures. The main good things are that they were intellectual. They were readers. They founded universities. However, the climax of the book is the massacre of the Pequot Indians at Fort Mystic. Or was the climax the banishment of Anne Hutchinson? She was expelled from a religious community whose rules she did not like anyway. Hutchinson was a heretic. Vowell wrote a lot about these two incidents and about Willams. Vowell's message seemed to be inclusiveness. I guess Puritans did not believe the right things.
Another problem with the book is she is so predictably liberal. She hates Reagan and Bush. She loves Kennedy. She keeps writing that beliefs can get you killed, which is unfortunately is a belief I think. The massacre of the Pequots was terribly wrong. Both sides made mistakes and the conflict escalated out of control. I was not sure what lesson we should learn from this tragedy except that I wished it never happened. She compared this incident with Truman's decision about nuclear bomb. I think she thought his decision was terribly wrong. She didn't really explain. I am sure Truman thought his decision was terrible also, but I don't think he felt the Japanese and circumstances gave him much of a choice. I don't want to judge him. Many people were going to die no matter what decision he was going to make.
The book was dry in spots and her quirkiness, which usually spices up her prose with pop culture references in earlier books, only helped a little. I learned some, disagreed with her a lot, and wished she could have more fun writing books with a more coherent message. She did not seem like she was enjoying herself.