I can’t help but love Sarah Vowell. She’s the nerdy girl who grew up to be cool and kept her geekiness intact. In fact, she makes a good living out of it. She’s the hipster Doris Kearns Goodwin. And best of all she makes the history go down with a spoonful of sugar. Vowell is now one of the country’s best-known public historians – a contributing editor of NPR’s This American Life, and author of many passionate personal tales of her relationship to American history including The Partly Cloudy Patriot and Assassination Vacation. Her newest book, The Wordy Shipmates, is her most thoroughly researched and fact-filled. This isn’t to say that it lacks her usual cynical wit tamed by a truly sincere attachment to the American story and all of its complexities.
Shipmates is a rambling and colorful description of the Massachusetts Bay Colony and its legacy, warts and all. I can honestly (and a little embarrassingly) say that I learned a tremendous amount about America’s chaotic beginnings while reading it. Who knew that John Winthrop, founding governor of Massachusetts and first Puritan, kept a detailed journal of those wacky first years? Who knew that Anne Hutchinson, loudmouth gadfly (the Ann Coulter of her day?), was killed by Indians in the Bronx after she was chased out of Boston. Vowell details the political and theological ups and downs of the Puritan tribe, rife with rich gossip and gory violence – one poor guy gets his ears lopped off for disagreeing with Winthrop. But the discourse, with all of its charm, can seem long and dragged out at times. And at only 250 pages! The bottom line is that Vowell gets so caught up in her passions that she assumes that we are all willing to trudge along for the ride – right down to every last nasty detail of the Pequot War.
But Shipmates is worth slogging through, for its fistful of facts and its poignant insights. Vowell never misses an opportunity to point out how contemporary America does and does not live up to its founders’ ideals. In the end Vowell offers us another slice of her considerable talents – a history buff who just can’t help it and can’t stop talking about it. Good for her.
Bill Adair is the Director of Heritage Philadelphia Program and has a not-so-secret and surprising crush on Sarah Vowell.
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