I can hardly believe that I'm going to write these words: I did not enjoy The Wordy Shipmates. Anyone who knows me and my love of Sarah Vowell will be *shocked* by this, as am I. But that fact remains that I found it boring. A slog. Too totally Puritanical. I know what she was attempting to do - put a human face on the Puritans who founded the Massachusetts Bay Colony, draw parallels to our modern evangelical (is that phrase an oxymoron?) Christian country, and make sharp distinctions between th...

I loved this book.Ok, so I love the complex, intensely intellectual, weird world of 17th century English Protestantism, when a whole bunch of ideas about the way the world did work and should work and could work were mixed in with intense biblical study and result was this passionate textual arguing and synthesising a set of sometimes strange and sometimes brilliant ideas. It was the discovery of this world, through Christopher Hill's The World Turned Upside Down, that gave me a lifelong interes...

This Sarah Vowell book about the Puritans in 17th century New England is perhaps her most Sarah Vowell-ian work. By that I mean, it's interesting but meandering, it's humorous but it's dense, it's historical but also modern.Much of the book focuses on John Winthrop, the governor of the Massachusetts Bay Colony. Vowell said she was interested in Winthrop and his shipmates in the 1630s because "the country I live in is haunted by the Puritans' vision of themselves as God's chosen people, as a beac...

Sarah Vowell is of Cherokee descent, and was raised in a Pentecostal community. This would, to a large degree, explain her fascination with Puritans. I am of Catholic descent, and could give two shits whether there is such an entity as God or not. This would, to an equally large degree, explain my total uninterest in Puritans; they didn't eradicate my ancestors, and they had no part in shaping my weltanschaung. To the extent that I regard them at all, I think of them as a bunch of kooks, a benig...

One of the great things about living in New York City was the parties. Most parties had a pretty broad spectrum of people in attendance; still, finding interesting (and fun) people to talk to always presented a challenge (nowadays, I just log onto Goodreads). Examples:Incoherent punk musician who hasn’t slept or taken a shower in, I’m guessing, three days.Wall Street type who rhapsodizes about hedge funds for 20 minute and whose enthusiasm soon becomes sandpaper on my brain.Surgeons who describe...

Okay, here goes:I’m torn on The Wordy Shipmates. I’m still a relative newbie to Sarah Vowell. With Assassination Vacation, I had that new love vibe going on. All that gushy ‘You’re so awesome, I’m so glad that I found you, where have you been all my life’ feeling. With The Partly Cloudy Patriot, I moved to that next step in a relationship, where you start to learn about the person and some of it reminds you why you fell in love and then sometimes it’s all like ‘My God, you can stop talking now.

I love Sarah Vowell. There's no other way to put it. This book is a perfect blend of historical essay and pop culture lit. Vowell's take on the Puritan Massachusetts Bay colony and Governor John Winthrop shows the "shining city on the hill" ideal as the Puritans saw it; which is not quite the way that Ronald Reagan meant it when he co-opted the phrase in the 1980's. Vowell is one of the few authors in the world today who can tie the two visions together and show how the people we are today can r...

This book took a while to get going for me. There was a lot of meandering prose, detours, and tangents, and honestly, I began to doubt my love for Sarah Vowell: Don't her books always seem just a wee bit better in retrospect than they do when I'm actually reading them, I wondered? Possibly, but thankfully this book did eventually pick up, and the narrative became more linear, which worked better for me. Honestly, my American history education has been woefully inadequate, so I was happy to get b...

I chose to read this book immediately after reading The Winthrop Woman because Vowell's topic was the Massachusetts Bay Colony in the same era. I had hoped to learn more about the history of those days. I did, in a way, but Ms. Vowell's points were usually hidden among attempts to be clever, and I tired quickly of sorting through such chaff to find the wheat. Is there truly a need to quote Monty Python regarding King Charles I? That sentence, on page 219 of my edition, ruined the erudite point M...

You never really learn much about the history of the American colonies post-thanksgiving through pre-Salem witch trials. This book fills that gap. I think the most provocative thing about this book is how puritan culture still permeates through-out the American Psyche to this day. Much of American attitudes and culture were all founded upon the principles that governed the lives of those original founders. This influence can be felt in how Americans view many issues ranging from gay marriage to

I have a disease. An "I can't remember shit about history" disease. I try to exercise this blight out of my system every once in a while by reading less dry, light on the dates, heavy on the scandal, humorous historical accounts. Sarah Vowell is one of the better prescriptions.With her infectious fascination of days gone by and adorably odd voice, it's hard not to pay attention.One thing I've learned so far is things have been unbearably whack since the puritans landed . . . nay, things have bee...

I think it's funny how there's always a moment during a Sarah Vowell book where I go, 'oh yeah! She just writes american history!' It came pretty early on in this one, too. This is not my favorite of her books. It's a lot more american history, and a lot less Sarah Vowell being a smartass about american history, than I prefer. I mean, I was into it, and I finished it, and I kept all the Puritans whose names begin with Ws straight, but I don't know. The whole appeal of Sarah Vowell for me is not

Sarah Vowell's quirky 12 year old voice almost requires me to read her books in audio form. This is the second book of Vowell's I've purchased in audio format, and beyond some of the glitches (damn you iTunes!) it's the preferred way to go.This book is probably the driest thing I've ever read by Vowell. Normally her The American Life bits and her previous books are a lot more anecdote-heavy, which was always a major selling point. She has a knack for taking some really diverse topics and relatin...

We don’t have a problem yet Sarah. But I am working on one. I am finding myself reading entire novels in-between your chapters. We’re still lovers—but I need to let you know I am seeing other people. I hope the passion resurrects but your expedition into the realm of Puritanism is leaving me limp in the brain. I won’t give up. Yet. Old stuff:Sarah was on The Daily Show again the other night hawking the arrival of her latest in paperback. And as Jon pointed out—it’s the same book she promoted on

"Let us thank God for having given us such [Puritan] ancestors; and let each successive generation thank Him, not less fervently, for being one step further from them in the march of ages."- Hawthorne, of all people (quoted on p. 58)This book is light. It's pleasantly chatty and engaging, but it's pop history at its poppiest. It suffers in comparison to Nathaniel Philbrick, whose Mayflower picks up at the exact moment Wordy Shipmates leaves off; Philbrick isn't as easy to read, but his history i...

2 stars - Meh. Just ok.I jumped into this book with hopes it would enhance my recent trip to Boston and the surrounding New England area. Sadly, this was not nearly as interesting as I thought it would be, and as I trudged through it I kept wondering when the fascinating things would appear. This was the second book I have read by Vowell and this one came across as more amateurish in writing quality. Her professionalism as an author has grown noticeably in the nine years between this book and, L...

Nothing says beach read like a book about New England’s Puritans and the colonies they founded. I enjoyed Sarah Vowell’s The Wordy Shipmates for the same reasons I enjoyed Assassination Vacation: she focuses on a very specific time in history or a specific idea and explores that theme in a chatty, informal and personal way. If you’re at all curious about the founding of Boston but don’t want to engage in a long, dry historical tome, pick up this book.Vowell’s book covers the founding of New Engl...

In The Wordy Shipmates Ms. Vowell half, or maybe three-quarters, succeeds with the transformation from memoirist with a history bend to a historian who occasionally injects her own story into the text. Vowell comes off like a particularly accessible high school teacher giving a series of lectures on early American history. She works hard to enliven the past and connect the implications to the modern world. Her passion for the subject is apparent, but I could have used more conventional historica...

my one problem with this book was this: considering that i could "listen" to sarah vowell all day long, the fact that she included no chapter breaks meant that i looked up from this book to realize that i hadn't gotten out of bed yet, and that the day had driven headlong into what could almost be described as evening. heavy price to pay for a few pages over coffee.and i suppose that, really, that is no problem at all; except that the lack of chapters also seemed, in this case, to equal a lack of...