Customer Reviews

I, Roger Williams: A Novel

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I stumbled across "I, Roger Williams" in the public library, while I was waiting for my wife to go through the check-out line. A brief glance was enough to capture my attention, even though I had heard nothing about this book. After a careful reading (sometimes with a dictionary at my side), I am ready to read it again. "I, Roger Williams" is a sublime work, weaving great insight about human relations with credible historical fiction. With a delicate touch Mary Lee Settle has written one of the finest works of fiction I have ever read. This is a book to read slowly and savor, as it sparks reflection about law and faith and tolerance, and it piques curiosity about historical detail. No other work of fiction has so artfully explored the continuity between old England and New England, or critiqued the weaknesses of our ancestors while celebrating their achievements. Mary Lee Settle breathes life into great men who have unjustly become footnotes for historians. And she paints the most joyous pictures of faithfulness in marriage and wisdom with aging that I have seen. I am deeply indebted to the author for her research, wit, grace, and maturity; and I recommend this work to all who have the patience to read a masterpiece.

This is a superb novel about an era of American and English history that is today often overlooked or misunderstood. But if you've read the historian Christopher Hill on the radical Puritans during the English Revolution and are interested in the connection between that world and early America - you should read this book. Mary Lee Settle has produced a beautiful novel that justly glorifies Roger Williams - an American whose love of liberty, freedom and his God lead him to live a life that should be far better known and admired than it is today.

I have to agree, however, with the previous reviewer that the cover of the book should be reworked. If I didn't already have a strong interest in the radical Puritans who settled Rhode Island, I doubt that I would have given the book a second glance.

I, Roger Williams by Mary Lee Settle, is a tour de force. A perfectly structured fictionalized autobiograpy of Roger Williams, the book makes the origins of the United States' most important freedoms, freedom of religion, belief, speech, and the separation of church and state come alive. At the same time it conveys the human side of our forefathers and the forces that shaped their thought and actions. A must read for anyone who would wish to understand and protect democracy.

If you're reading this in hopes of finding a conventional, comprehensive biography of Roger Williams, you're in the wrong place. But don't go!!! This book - more accurately, historical novel - by Mary Lee Settle goes beyond a mere recitation of biographical events. It unfolds layers of history and preconception to reveal a flesh-and-blood human being, his anger, joys, frustration, compassion, sense of justice, love of God, and even his love of a woman. This novel is a masterful achievement, and Ms. Settle has given us a most humanistic look at a man who for so long has been a historical curiosity.

Roger Williams was of course the founder of Rhode Island. Until recently, that's about all I knew of him (also that a small, liberal arts college is named after him). In a perfect world, his name would be up there with Jefferson, Lincoln, and Martin Luther King. Like King, Williams was a minister of God who was attacked for preaching tolerance and civil rights. He fled to Rhode Island in the 1630s, in the dead of winter, after being banished by the Massachusetts Puritans for rejecting their version of Christianity. He took shelter with the Narragansett Indians, learned their customs and language, became a staunch defender of Indian land rights, and eventually published the first book on Native American languages. He has been called the first American radical, and his intense devotion to the ideas of individual liberty and the separation of church and state directly inspired the generation who wrought American independence a century later.

Mary Lee Settle, rather than offering a conventional biography of Williams, has allowed Williams to reminisce, in his own voice, on the events of his life. We get the perspective of an elderly man who recalls with reverence his beloved mentor, Sir Edward Coke. We also bear witness to the unfathomable tyranny of 17th century England, as well as the tension and excitement of the burgeoning civil war, when Cromwell was still a brooding revolutionary. Settle examines the equivocal relationship between Williams and colonial governor John Winthrop, who remained respectful and friendly toward Williams even through bitter disagreements.

Most of this book deals with Williams' experiences back in England. Only at the very end does Settle discuss (through Williams) his troubled time in Salem and new life in "Providence." I believe she does this to accentuate those experiences that were most formative in Williams' thinking, that most contributed to his fully realized conception of religious liberty. So we are able to understand WHY this stubborn, elderly man sacrificed so much for the good of this new society in America: he was intensely fearful of replicating the wrongs that occurred in the old world.

So I guess what I'm trying to say is: buy this book! Settle pored over all the original writings of Williams to be able to speak in Williams' voice. Our English language has changed more than a little in 350 years, so the language here can be somewhat challenging. But the fact that Settle has brought such warmth and authenticity to the narration is remarkable.

Freedom of expression and religion are taken for granted in America these days. But it wasn't always so. "I, Roger Williams" honors one man who risked his life so that I can say, in this review, "I will worship God, or not worship God, in whatever way I choose."

Imagine that this book had a more intriguing title. Imagine that it had a more interesting cover. If the above were true, I imagine that people might pick it up in bookshops out of curiosity, read and enjoy it. As it is, they may not, which is unfortunate. My bookshop doesn't even carry the thing. But 'I, Roger Williams', despite the bland sound of it, is worth reading for those who enjoy good, solid historical novels.

Revolving more around 17th century England and its politics and troubles than the actual settlement of Providence, each chapter begins inside the head of an old, old man, and goes on to recount his boyhood in London, his life in England and his assosiation and education with Sir Edward Coke. These recollections reveal how Williams' ideas were shaped and how his conscience emerged, necessitating his eventual flight to America and later from the 'visible saints' of Boston to a place out of their jurisdiction, the future Rhode Island.

I only read this book out of a bizarre interest in early Rhode Island (no need to explain that here...!). Although disappointed on that front (only a very small part of the book actually takes place there), I am glad to have discovered and read a rewarding historical novel which gives insight into the beginnings of this country as we know it.

A very interesting and well written (in the "first person")look into the life of Roger Williams. I found this a reflective book on his early life in England and how it tied into his life in New England a very good read. I send a copy to another family genealogist who does Rhode Island research. The book helped me get into the minds of those that lived when our ancestors were Rhode Island in the mid 1600's.

This is an incredible, beautiful and engaging novel that deserves more attention and circulation than it currently has.

Ms. Settle has breathed almost cinematic life into Roger Williams, this remote character from the seemingly distant past and brings to the fore a towering figure of a man whose life's work was not only vital to the history of religious freedom, but perhaps more importantly, to civil liberties, human decency and the subsequent political movements that came to cast off the chains of monarchical power in the West.

It is a highly personal story that follows the moral and ethical evolution of a man who began his career as a lowly clerk in England's high court, known then as the Star Chamber, where "justice" was meted out with a heavy hand by an arrogant and merciless gentry; where the un-landed and wretched of the earth are sentenced for the slightest infractions to be drawn and quartered, burned alive, flogged or forever imprisoned. It is here where Roger Williams' inherent sense of decency and justice begins to take root inside of him, and eventually carries him to the New World where he will create a colony founded upon principals of religious tolerance and (relatively) fairly meted out justice, void of the arrogance of royal power and arbitrary consequences.

It is also a simultaneously heartbreaking and heartening tale of a man whose thoughts and ideas were somewhat ahead of their time; we feel his dissapointments and his pain as treaties between the local Indians (his allies and close friends, whose languages he spoke fluently and whose cultures he embraced) and settlers begin to unravel, leading eventually into what would come to be called The Pequot Wars, ending in bloodshed, fire and heartbreak.

Even with all this, Roger Williams manages to remain steadfast in his optimism and in his inherent faith that men will one day be able to live together as brothers, in peace, each faction working together as part of the common good.

His vision for the world, alas, remains to be seen, but it gives one hope.

Had this been the first book I read on Roger Williams, I might have enjoyed it more;however, I feel it is a weak attempt to present Roger Williams' beiefs and their evolution. There was way too much time spent learning of Edward Coke (although interesting, not the subject of the book). There is more to his leaving the Church of England that just being exiled from the Bay Colony. We get no religious philosophy; just political. Why did he found the Baptist Church in America and then leave it? Seven generations back he was my grandfather; he deserves a better telling. A much more filling work is Liberty of Conscience:Roger Williams in America, by Edwin S. Gaustad.