Review by New York Times Review
SARAH VOWELL is a problem. She's a problem like Sarah Palin, Cyndi Lauper and Kathy Griffin. She's annoying. Or, really, she's double-annoying, because she styles herself as annoying - provocative-annoying - and if you become annoyed by her you seem to be conceding the point. She's gotten to you. Take "The Wordy Shipmates," her fifth book. Vowell has integrated her sarcasm, flat indie-girl affect and kitsch worship refined in print and on public radio - into a pop history of the Massachusetts Bay Colony. Known for her adenoid-helium voice, Vowell is a genial talker but an undisciplined writer. This new book mixes jiggers of various weak liquors - paraphrase, topical one-liners, blogger tics - and ends up tasting kind of festive but bad, like Long Island iced tea. "The Wordy Shipmates" also includes a few stand-up comedy routines, plainly written to be performed. Vowell delivered one good-natured but uninspired spiel (about sitcoms that address American history) for a "This American Life" stage show. It includes a string of asides about Richie, Potsy and the gang on "Happy Days." It should not have been committed to print. Vowell, who constantly emphasizes how nerdy (meaning impressive) she finds her own interest in the Puritans, introduces figures like John Winthrop and Roger Williams as if no one's ever heard of them. She delivers a farrago of free-floating pedantry - "the kind of smart-alecky diatribe for which I've gotten paid for 20 years" - having evidently made it her job to enlighten slacker GenXers with a remedial history of our own nation. It's not right. Vowell's whole alt-everything vibe is just dated enough to be cringey. And then there's her Great Plains accent: can something so wholesome-soundin' be real? And her politics. Perfectly early-millennium coastal (green, be good, Obama, etc.). Can she really take pleasure in plumping for an autofill ideology that's so widely shared? Evidently she can. The book, which on one level is a chronological account of Winthrop's attempt to build an exemplary "city upon a hill," hums along with chipper personal details and relaxed talkshow-guest banter. Vowell breaks from her breezy rehash of (mostly) the work of the historian Perry Miller to supply "what's the deal with that" perceptions about Ron Paul, historical re-enactors and magazine subscription cards. She sounds as if she's enjoying herself. But what's the deal with the rehash? These days, we have sterling academic American historians (who can hardly be said to have overlooked the Puritans, in whose intellectual tradition the study of American history - at Harvard, notably - was originally conceived). But we are also in a golden age of popular narrative history, produced not only by David McCullough and Ron Chernow and Doris Kearns Goodwin, but by PBS and the History Channel. With all these middle-brow historians making scholarly work perfectly accessible, do we really need still more accessibility - pierced-brow history, maybe, with TV and pop-music references? The answer would seem to be no. And yet, if nothing else, "The Wordy Shipmates" finds a way to string together excerpts from Winthrop and Williams (and John Cotton and John Underhill) that keeps you reading. My experience of the book: I kept being annoyed, and I kept reading. Most of the time that she wasn't riffing or telling jokes, Vowell was merely quoting from a 17th-century sermon or pamphlet with the preface that what I was about to read was amazing or frightening. More often than not, she was right. THROUGHOUT, Vowell can't decide what tense to use: the historical present, the past, and that weird Ken Burns "would" thing ("Cotton Mather would change America forever"). But by book's end she's got you cornered. Just as you're thinking, O.K., the history of the Massachusetts Bay Colony is worth retelling, but could you turn down the hipster stuff, Vowell manages to align herself squarely with the great American dissident and feminist Anne Hutchinson. Rats! Once again, Vowell gets to be the abrasive wild card. She's annoying and uppity, and the book has made the case for being annoying and uppity. She's won. Vowell may not be Anne Hutchinson (hey, did you know that Hutchinson had 15 children?), but she's a legitimate upstart. After all, having grown up a part-Cherokee Pentecostalist, she has somehow managed to become the one and only Sarah Vowell: a respected social commentator, a public radio star, the voice of Violet in "The Incredibles" and the author of five untrivial books, all while befriending (the tour-de-force acknowledgments section suggests) J. J. Abrams, Dave Eggers, Jake Gyllenhaal, Spike Jonze, Greil Marcus, David Sedaris and Zadie Smith. How impressive. How annoying. Virginia Heffernan writes The Medium, a column about digital culture, for The New York Times Magazine.
Copyright (c) The New York Times Company [October 27, 2009]
Review by Booklist Review
*Starred Review* Although Puritanism is conflated with modern religious fundamentalism and its disregard for any learning that doesn't come from the Bible, Vowell argues passionately that Puritans were as enamored of wisdom and knowledge as religious virtue. Focusing on the Puritans who settled in 1692 in the Massachusetts Bay Colony, Vowell laments the image of Puritans as boring killjoys when in fact they were fascinating killjoys who, aside from their belief that Catholics were going to hell, were much more open to new ideas than we've been led to think. Drawing on letters, essays, and sermons, Vowell offers a penetrating look at the tensions between John Winthrop, John Cotton, Roger Williams, Anne Hutchinson, and others as they argued about the role of religion in government and everyday life. They saw themselves as God's chosen people, a credo that set the tone for American history and notions of manifest destiny that have led to all manner of imposition on other lands and cultures. But they also vehemently debated separation of church and state and founded Harvard, even as they pondered the destiny of what Winthrop referred to as the shining city on the hill. A book dense with detail, insight, and humor.--Bush, Vanessa Copyright 2008 Booklist
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
Vowell's account of the post-Mayflower Puritans of New England and their influence on contemporary American culture over the centuries is thoroughly enjoyable in print. But hearing her ironic but passionate little-girl voice making history accessible and providing humorous and often trenchant present-day asides, as she did on NPR's This American Life, is even better. In addition to fleshing out history with extensive quotes from journals and other documents of the time, Vowell has assembled a sizable cast of co-readers, including Eric Bogosian, Peter Dinklage, Jill Clayburgh, Campbell Scott and Dermot Mulroney. Some narrators feel like stunt casting, although there's a lovely cameo by Catherine Keener, whose calm, self-contained voice is perfect for Anne Hutchinson on trial. Vowell and company (aided by Michael Giacchino's musical score) make for pleasurable listening. A Riverhead hardcover (Reviews, July 28). (Oct.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Review by Library Journal Review
Vowell revisits 17th-century New England and discovers that the Puritans were not always what they seemed. With a national tour. (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Review by Kirkus Book Review
NPR contributor Vowell (Assassination Vacation, 2005, etc.) takes a hard but affectionate look at the legacy of those doughty, slightly deranged Puritans who landed in the New World in 1630. Fans will be pleased to see that Vowell's admittedly smart-alecky style is alive and well: It's not every historical monograph that tosses together Anne Hutchinson and Nancy Drew, Dolly Parton and John Endecott. The author's characteristic devotion to detail is also evident. Previously she was obsessed with America's political assassinations; here she pores over the texts--the many texts--of the principals who interest her: John Cotton, John Winthrop and Roger Williams, in addition to the aforementioned Hutchinson and Endecott. She likes to visit the places most relevant to her subjects too; we learn, for instance, that a Boston jewelry store now occupies the site where Mistress Anne's house once stood. Vowell examines what she sees as the cascading effects of the Puritans' arrival, drawing a straight line from Massachusetts Bay to Abu Ghraib. She continually bashes the current President Bush, points out the tarnish that others seem to ignore on the well-burnished image of President Reagan (who patently lied about Iran-Contra) and ends with a paean to JFK. This approach can be jarring, as the author yanks readers back and forth between recent and colonial history from Charlie's Angels to the Visible Saints. Still, she dives into dense Puritan sermons and self-flagellating journal entries to emerge, generally, with a bit of truth. She chides us for careless use of the word Puritan and disdain for public intellectuals. "The downside of democracy, she finds, is "a suspicion of people who know what they are talking about." In the end, she admires Winthrop's surprising tenderness, Hutchinson's chatterbox courage. At times dense, at times silly, at times surpassingly wise. Copyright ©Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
