The Wordy Shipmates by Sarah Vowell
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Book Reviews of The Wordy Shipmates
Book Review: I liked it, but this book has flaws
Summary: 4 Stars
Customer review from the Amazon Vine™ Program (What's this?)
The Wordy Shipmates is my first Sarah Vowell book. To be perfectly honest, I have never heard of her before. Therefore, I was in for a surprise. I assumed I was going to get a straight, scholarship-filled book about the Massachusetts Bay Puritans (as opposed to the more famous Plymouth ones). Instead, I found myself in the midst of an amusing armchair history with an interest in linking the past with the present.
Vowell takes us on an amusing, yet literate, journey through the first decade or so of the Colony's first years, focusing on politics, ego and struggle. John Winthrop, the first governor of the Colony, is the central historical figure of the book. His vision of a magnificent Puritan "city upon a hill" is the central metaphor of the book, and one which Ronald Reagan exploited while he was president of the United States. Winthrop's chief adversaries are Roger Williams, the banished theologian who founded the Rhode Island Colony, Anne Hutchinson, a housewife turned unauthorized Puritan minister (also banished), and the Pequot Indians (mostly destroyed).
While amusing and informative, The Wordy Shipmates fails when it attempts to link the present with the past. Vowell succeeds at first: her initial focus on religion and strict mores strikes a powerful chord between our post-September 11th world and Puritan fanaticism. But Vowell only makes the connection briefly and fails to link the two eras passed that, save the aforementioned Reagan. This weakness becomes quite obvious in the final pages of the book. Vowell suddenly calls upon the ghost of JFK, who also used the "city upon the hill" metaphor, and then suddenly ends the book. It is almost as if Vowell was tired of trying to link her beloved Pilgrims with the present and decided to hand in her manuscript and grab some chai.
This weakness, however, did not limit my enjoyment of the book. I found the story of the Colony and its characters fascinating, and Vowell successfully brought their world to life in our own.
Book Review: A Fascinating Book about a Subject I Never Found Interesting Before
Summary: 4 Stars
This book is about Puritans in New England from approximately 1630 to 1651, with historical trips to the future and the past to bolster points and provide insight.
The book is wonderfully detailed and full of diary entries and other quotes about and by John Winthrop, Roger Williams, and John Cotton, all Puritan heavyweights. There's also a brief bit about Anne Hutchinson and other players in the Indian-New England-England crucible that became the United States of America.
Vowell makes her points cleanly and clearly, although I personally would have appreciated a less flippant style. I guess, that however, is her trademark, and I must say that she has piqued my interest, especially in Roger Williams, with this book. The time period she writes of here doesn't usually interest me, but I'm interested now.
This book is described as "part memoir, part meditation, and part road-trip" by The Atlanta Journal-Constitution in a quote on the back cover. The memoir part doesn't particularly interest me because she interjects personal details and some one-liners that fell flat with me. I kept getting the vision of a stand-up comic waiting for the audience to laugh after a punch line. I didn't laugh. I found that it distracted me from her points about Puritans and New England of the 1630s and 1640s. I know I'm the exception to the rule and these personal facts and "jokes" will endear her to most audiences.
However, some of what seemed to be digressions, about Kennedy and Lincoln, Reagan and Gore, while initially startling, made sense as I continued to read. And her details of the Pequot War, her visit to Rhode Island, and excerpts from the Royal Charter of Rhode Island, the sermon "A Model of Christian Charity" by John Winthrop, and "A Key into the Language of America" by Roger Williams are used effectively to make her points and to edify and educate.
I had never heard of Sarah Vowell before reading The Wordy Shipmates. A very good book. An author whose other books I will search out.
Book Review: A Sharp, Witty Look at The Founding Fathers
Summary: 4 Stars
Customer review from the Amazon Vine™ Program (What's this?)
Having grown up in New England with ancestry both from the Mayflower and native American, I was really interested in Sarah Vowell's c
coverage of the puritans who settled the Boston area. Who were these people?
One of the interesting things she pointed out is that most of us get our entire concept of the pilgrims from the sitcoms we watched as children. In retrospect - I agree. We also place a tremendous amount of importance upon Plymouth Colony (because of Thanksgiving) when the Boston colony was actually much more influential upon history.
Lucky for us, the shipmates "wordiness" refers to the facts that they were a highly literate bunch who wrote all the time. A little investigation tells us a lot about them. From their written diary entries, letters, and sermons, we can get a good sense of how they thought. It's also important to place them into the context of what was happening in England at the time.
Vowell does a great job of displaying just how the beliefs of these Puritans shaped the US,up to and including the politics of today. It is important to note that these people were Calvinists, anti-democracy, intolerant to any beliefs but their own. While this sounds un-American on the surface, just blow the fine dust off current events to see these values still in action.
She posits that some countries are despotic and don't pretend they are not, while America frequently acts in despotic ways - but pretends that it holds the moral standard for the rest of the world. In a similar way the Pilgrims believed that the saved were already chosen, but they should go around and act like they were saved anyway - just in case.
This is a very interesting and witty read. Vowell's writing is clear, sharp, and extremely well researched.
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: 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.