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The Wordy Shipmates by Sarah Vowell
Book Summary InformationAuthor: Sarah Vowell Edition: Hardcover Audio: English (Unknown); English (Original Language); English (Published) Published: 2008-10-07 ISBN: 1594489998 Number of pages: 272 Publisher: Riverhead Hardcover
Book Reviews of The Wordy ShipmatesBook Review: An irreverent look at our Puritan legacy Summary: 5 Stars
As a New Yorker and self-professed member of the media-elite who hails from a conservative, Western, small town, Pentecostal background, Vowell delights in historical contradictions and deep roots.
NPR contributor, humorist and author of "Assassination Vacation," and "The Partly Cloudy Patriot," Vowell focuses a lens of irreverent respect on the Puritan founders of the Massachusetts Bay Colony. This is the larger group that followed the Pilgrims in 1630 and established Boston. They were somewhat more business-oriented than the Pilgrims and considered themselves members of the Anglican Church rather than Separatists like the Pilgrims.
It's partly for this that Vowell is drawn to them. "Maybe it's because I live in a world crawling with separatists that I find religious zealots with a tiny bit of wishy-washy, pussy-footing compromise in them deeply attractive."
Looking over their legacy - the Puritan work ethic, separation of church and state, the concept of personal salvation - Vowell focuses on three outsize personalities.
John Winthrop led the group on their journey to the New World, became governor of Massachusetts and left a massive diary. Roger Williams was banished for his opinions, particularly his insistence that government not interfere in religious matters, and left to found Rhode Island. Anne Hutchinson was banished too after a trial over her ideas of personal salvation made her seem dangerously witch-like.
Vowell takes us through the turbulent history of those days - the Indian wars and shifting alliances, problems with England and the Crown, internal squabbling and the founding of Boston. But her real interest is on the concepts that have echoes throughout our history.
The Puritans' Calvinist belief in themselves as the chosen people has come down to us pretty well perfectly preserved. Winthrop's sermon to his shipmates, "Christian Charity," exhorts them to show themselves as models of Christian fortitude, "For we must consider that we shall be as a city upon a hill." In other words, the eyes of the world will be watching.
Though this sermon was barely mentioned in Winthrop's day, it has since served up quotes to numerous politicians. One of Reagan's favorite images was "that shining city on a hill."
Vowell revels in the double-sided whammies of zealotry. She mines Winthrop's sermon for its exhortations to love one's enemy, to help each other at all costs, to show justice and mercy. And explores the underside of this confident righteousness morality - enforced conformity, intolerance of dissent, an iron-handed holier than thou perspective.
Roger Williams, a man I was taught in school to think of as a moderate, was an argumentative zealot, who believed that everybody else was wrong. He didn't want government interfering in his religion though and for that we thank him. As for Anne Hutchinson: "She suffers the same fate in the historical record as the Pequot; her thoughts and deeds have been passed down to us solely through the writings of white men who pretty much hate her guts."
Vowell makes connections between the founders and our national character - from Reagan and Martin Luther King Jr. to the community of New Yorkers after 9/11. Our system of government, from electing a president to rustling up the Patriot Act, has its roots in the Puritans.
Vowell's examinations of these connections and the history itself is serious and funny, quirky and contemplative. Sure, some of the religious distinctions and heated arguments are pretty dry, but if anyone can enliven them, it's Vowell.
Summary of The Wordy ShipmatesThe Wordy Shipmates is New York Times?bestselling author Sarah Vowell?s exploration of the Puritans and their journey to America to become the people of John Winthrop?s ?city upon a hill??a shining example, a ?city that cannot be hid.?
To this day, America views itself as a Puritan nation, but Vowell investigates what that means? and what it should mean. What was this great political enterprise all about? Who were these people who are considered the philosophical, spiritual, and moral ancestors of our nation? What Vowell discovers is something far different from what their uptight shoe-buckles-and- corn reputation might suggest. 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. Along the way she asks:
* Was Massachusetts Bay Colony governor John Winthrop a communitarian, a Christlike Christian, or conformity?s tyrannical enforcer? Answer: Yes! * Was Rhode Island?s architect, Roger Williams, America?s founding freak or the father of the First Amendment? Same difference. * What does it take to get that jezebel Anne Hutchinson to shut up? A hatchet. * What was the Puritans? pet name for the Pope? The Great Whore of Babylon.
Sarah Vowell?s special brand of armchair history makes the bizarre and esoteric fascinatingly relevant and fun. She takes us from the modern-day reenactment of an Indian massacre to the Mohegan Sun casino, from old-timey Puritan poetry, where ?righteousness? is rhymed with ?wilderness,? to a Mayflower-themed waterslide. Throughout, The Wordy Shipmates is rich in historical fact, humorous insight, and social commentary by one of America?s most celebrated voices. Thou shalt enjoy it.
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