The Wordy Shipmates (Hardcover)

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Key Phrases: healing garden, New England, Roger Williams, John Cotton (more...)

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Starred Review. Essayist and public radio regular Vowell (Assassination Vacation) revisits America's Puritan roots in this witty exploration of the ways in which our country's present predicaments are inextricably tied to its past. In a style less colloquial than her previous books, Vowell traces the 1630 journey of several key English colonists and members of the Massachusetts Bay Colony. Foremost among these men was John Winthrop, who would become governor of Massachusetts. While the Puritans who had earlier sailed to Plymouth on the Mayflower were separatists, Winthrop's followers remained loyal to England, spurred on by Puritan Reverend John Cotton's proclamation that they were God's chosen people. Vowell underscores that the seemingly minute differences between the Plymouth Puritans and the Massachusetts Puritans were as meaningful as the current Sunni/Shia Muslim rift. Gracefully interspersing her history lesson with personal anecdotes, Vowell offers reflections that are both amusing (colonial history lesson via The Brady Bunch) and tender (watching New Yorkers patiently waiting in line to donate blood after 9/11). (Oct.)
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From The Washington Post

From The Washington Post's Book World/washingtonpost.com Reviewed by Stephen Prothero Many young people today are allergic to history, even of the U.S. variety, and if you're foolish enough to steer them toward the colonial period, they start not just to sneeze but to retch. Sarah Vowell, a regular contributor to Chicago Public Radio's "This American Life," wants to make history go down easy. So she writes about the past with the irreverence of late-night television. Not long into The Wordy Shipmates, her new book on colonial New England and its aftereffects, we encounter not only such Puritan stalwarts as John Cotton and John Winthrop but also "The Brady Bunch," "Happy Days" and "The Simpsons." This approach yields a book that is as easy to read as The Fonz is to watch -- a book sprinkled with the sort of phrases and punctuation (exclamation points for example!) commonly found in text messages. But this breeziness also produces some simplistic arguments. Why do Americans see themselves as exceptional and ride that exceptionalism into war in Iraq? "Answer: Because Henry VIII had a crush on a woman who was not his wife." Still, Vowell gets a lot right. She is right to see the United States as a "Puritan nation"; the Puritans' influence over us did not die with the birth of the nation in the 1770s or even the birth of the counterculture in the 1960s. And she is right to understand the Puritans as perhaps the quintessential people of the book. The core premise of The Wordy Shipmates is that their "single-minded obsession with one book, the Bible, made words the center of their lives." What historian Perry Miller called the Puritans' "errand into the wilderness" was not primarily an economic or a political errand, Vowell argues. It was an errand in reading and writing and interpreting texts. The core text of this venture -- and of Vowell's book -- is John Winthrop's 1630 sermon "A Model of Christian Charity." Here Winthrop describes Massachusetts as "a city upon a hill" and sets in motion the sordid history of American exceptionalism -- a history that, according to Vowell, has vouchsafed to us (among other things) wars in the Philippines, Vietnam and Iraq. On first blush Vowell seems like an angry atheist set down at the historian's table. But under this anger is a good measure of empathy. Hers is not the narrative of an angry adolescent who never wants to return to her Pentecostal parents' home. It is the narrative of an adult who wants to see her American home for what it is -- and for what it has done to her, and to us. Central to Winthrop's "Christian Charity" was a "communitarian ethos" that Vowell admires. Breaking for one telling moment out of her oh-so-21st-century pose of Manhattanish irony, she refers to Winthrop's injunction to "delight in each other, make other's conditions our own, rejoice together, mourn together, labor and suffer together" as "one of the most beautiful sentences in the English language." And at the end of the book she admits to falling in love with one side of Winthrop: "the Winthrop [whom] Cotton Mather celebrates for sharing his firewood with the needy, the Winthrop who scolds Thomas Dudley for overcharging the poor, the Winthrop of 'Christian Charity,' who called for 'enlargement toward others' and 'brotherly affection.' " Vowell, who was raised in Oklahoma and now lives in New York City, is part of what Republican candidates refer to as the East Coast elite, so it should not be surprising that the politics here is standard-fare liberal: President Reagan bad, Dr. King good. Bad of the Puritans to banish Anne Hutchinson -- "the Puritan Oprah" -- and to kill so many Indians in the Pequot War. To all of which, the Homer Simpson in me says, "D'oh!" Nonetheless, there are important historical points to make, and Vowell makes many of them well. At some moment between the time Winthrop delivered his famous sermon and Reagan was inaugurated, the covenant between Americans and God lost its "if" -- if you do mercy and seek justice, then God will bless you; but if you do otherwise, God will deliver punishment. We may be a Puritan nation, but what we have retained is only Puritanism's easy half. We are convinced that God blesses our endeavors, but we seldom consider that some of those endeavors are not worth blessing. And it never occurs to us that they might bring down upon us God's righteous anger. Vowell also makes something intriguing of the oft-discussed distinction between Winthrop and colonial New England's champion of religious liberty, Roger Williams. These two men, she observes, do not just embody the divide between "orthodox Massachusetts" and "madcap Rhode Island." They also illustrate what she calls "the fundamental conflict of American life" -- "between the body politic and the individual, between we the people and each person's pursuit of happiness." "At his city-on-a-hill best," Vowell writes in one of her book's best passages, "Winthrop is Pete Seeger, gathering a generation around the campfire to sing their shared folk songs. Williams is Bob Dylan plugging in at Newport, making his own noise." Vowell, whose other books include a quirky travelogue of sites related to the assassinations of Lincoln, Garfield and McKinley, obviously is partial to people who make their own noise. But to her credit, she also recognizes the dangers individualism poses to community. In the end, however, what makes The Wordy Shipmates float is not so much its arguments as its voice. Most writing on the Puritans is as dour as the Puritans themselves. Vowell has fun with them, and in the process, she helps us take seriously both their lives and their legacy.
Copyright 2008, The Washington Post. All Rights Reserved.

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 272 pages
• Publisher: Riverhead Hardcover; First Edition/ First Printing edition (October 7, 2008)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1594489998
• ISBN-13: 978-1594489990
• Product Dimensions: 8.4 x 5.7 x 1.1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 13.4 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 3.8 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (119 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #18,517 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

63 of 69 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars A little-- well-- wordy..., October 3, 2008

By	L. F. Smith (E. Wenatchee, WA) - See all my reviews (TOP 500 REVIEWER)    (REAL NAME)

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I love Sarah Vowell's books. She is an absolute master at examining a historical subject, relating it to the world we live in, and inserting her personal foibles to it, all in a narrative that moves so smoothly and quickly that you're sometimes surprised that you've read the whole book at a sitting. That's what she attempts to do here, but she doesn't quite pull it off this time.

Don't misunderstand me; this isn't at all a bad book. In fact, it's fascinating. It is jam-packed with fascinating information about the Massachusetts Puritans and the religious, social, and historical context of their settlement. Vowell weaves comments about her family background, education, travels, and hopes and fears into the narrative, just as she usually does.

When Vowell's writing works best, it's driven by her quirkiness and her ability to veer off on what seems to be a tangent, then bring everything together in the end. She does that here, but just not as well as in her other books. Perhaps the subject just isn't as susceptible to the Vowell treatment as the subjects of her other books.

I actually enjoyed this book, and I recommend it highly. However, it's just not as good as her other books made me expect it to be. Well worth reading, though.

34 of 41 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars The pre-modern side of Puritan New England, October 2, 2008

By	Jean E. Pouliot (Newburyport, MA United States) - See all my reviews (TOP 500 REVIEWER)    (REAL NAME)

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There's nothing like a Sarah Vowell book to provide a new slant on a historical period. In "The Wordy Shipmates," she tackles a rather odd era, and one for which most people have definite opinions: the settlement of Massachusetts by the Puritans. Vowell does not reveal that the Puritans were *not* the American version of the Taliban. Certainly, they were fanatical, even by the standards of their own time, and harsh and guilt-ridden to boot. Their endless arguments about the meaning of biblical verses and their extreme hatred and fear of "Papists" put them two steps away from the loony bin. Yet they possessed attitudes (and paranoias) that put them squarely at the root of what would become the American nation character. Having arrived on these shores, by the grace of God, they were ferociously jealous of their freedom from the intrigues and violent interference of the English court and church. Worried sick about takeover by their own government, they were careful to give at least the appearance of subservience to the powerful crown. Vowell's hero is John Winthrop, the first governor of the collection of rude shacks that became the city of Boston. Winthrop is an oxymoron -- a Puritan with a streak of practical morality -- who rules with a weird combination of Christian compassion and tyrannical ruthlessness. Over a fractious and easily offended populace, Winthrop bobs and weaves like a prize fighter, somehow managing to keep his society from fragmenting. Winthrop nearly meets his match with Roger Williams though. Williams, far from being the free-speech champion that we liberals thought him to be, is even more of a Puritan than the Puritans. He finds that his austere compatriots to be insufficiently willing to separate from the ungodly, raising the hackles of "moderates" like Winthrop, and eventually earning himself banishment from the community. Yet Vowell finds the silver lining in Williams, who, arguing for a wall to keep the government out of the *church*, set the stage for future debate that bore fruit over a century and a half later in the Bill of Rights.

"The Wordy Shipmates" is a fascinating read, peppered throughout with Vowell's entertaining and snarky similes and parallels. Her discussion of the way that most Americans (including herself) get their history from popular shows like "Happy Days" and "The Brady Bunch" is illuminating and a little scary. To counter this, Vowell provides plenty of primary material -- mostly from Winthrop's journals -- and provides explanations that give context and cut through the turgid 17th-century prose. Most aspects of tehstory move briskly,. Though her telling of the genocidal Pequot "War" drags a bit. She does do a great job of seeing how Winthrop's' "City on a Hill" image has been used and misused throughout history, especially by those who missed the point that at its base, the City was intended to describe a society whose members were bound to one another through Christian charity. For a closer look at a society which we tend to judge and dismiss, "The Wordy Shipmates" book is a gem.

17 of 20 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Wandering, Informal History of the Pilgrims, November 11, 2008

By	Kevin Currie-Knight "Education Grad Student" (Newark, Delaware) - See all my reviews (TOP 500 REVIEWER)

This review is from: The Wordy Shipmates (Audio CD)

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Upon reading this book, I struggled for a few days on how many stars to give this. At times, I really liked Vowell's very personal-essay-like history of the Pilgrims at the Massachusetts Bay Colony. Vowell is very knowledgeable and, at times, is a very good and passionate writer. At times, however, I was also either bored by redundancy, waiting for a seemingly episodic collection of essays to "come together" and read like a book, or annoyed by Vowell's constant employment of sarcasm.

Alas, I chose to give this book 3 of 5 stars. I figure that the best way to explain is to go through a list of pros and cons.

PROS: _________________________________________

Vowell's book on the Pilgrims is obviously a very personal one, and her enthusiasm and passion for the subject shows very well. She recounts not only the tortuous adventure the Pilgrims took from Britian to America and their struggle to build a city, but also tours she has been on, journals she has pored through, and what the Pilgrims mean to her.

The Wordy Shipmates works best - works quite well - when it is read as a collection of themed essays, rather than a flowing book. Once I began to read it in this way, I was better able to admire Vowell's frequent and lengthy asides (where an essay on x quickly becomes an essay on y). Each essay explores some facet about the Pilgrims - their religiosity, their caring nature, their admiration of hard work - but each essay stands on its own more than connects with other essays.

CONS: ____________________________________________

As something of a collection of essays, Vowell can be (quite) redundant. When exploring the Pilgrims, she often goes back to the same points (every other essay seems to come back to how the "City on a HIll" metaphor led to US exceptionalism; true, but no more true the hundredth time than the first.) Many essays focus on the same topics over and over through slightly different "angles." Good for a 20 minute NPR piece, but not for a book.

For a book on such a meaty subject, I really found Vowell's frequent sarcasm and attempts at humor a little out of place and repetitive. I suppose that towards the end of the book, I felt the way I did after seeing Juno; the quips are interesting at first and annoying half way through.

FOR THOSE CONTEMPLATING THE AUDIOBOOK: I fully agree with another reviewer who advised that this book may be better read than listened to. While some might find Vowell's "Lisa Simpson with a lisp" voice endearing, I find that her akward delivery made the listening...well...akward. Nor did I like the fact that EVERY SINGLE quote in the book is read by a guest reader (which is fine when they are reading a passage, but tedious when they are reading one or two words).

I wholly reccomemnd this book for those wanting to read a decent collection of historical essays they don't want to have to think too deeply about.