I expressed some mixed feelings about Sarah Vowell’s The Wordy Shipmates in my post from earlier this week, and I thought I’d expand on those a bit. For the most part, I enjoyed reading the book. It’s under 300 pages and is a quick read, so it’s a good way to learn or review a little history, especially if longer, more serious history books aren’t your thing (which they aren’t for me).
Vowell tells the story of the pilgrims who sailed to America in 1630 and founded the Massachusetts Bay Colony. She analyzes what motivated them to leave England, and then describes the problems that faced them once they arrived — the challenge of settling themselves in to a strange and difficult landscape, the internal conflicts and disagreements that inevitably came up, and the wars with Indians that eventually arose. The most interesting parts were her descriptions of the Puritan’s religious beliefs and the legacy they left to America. She argues repeatedly that although we think of ourselves as cultural descendants of the Puritans, our relationship to their legacy is enormously complicated. The evangelicals of today who might seem like the Puritans’ most obvious descendants differ from them in crucial ways. John Winthrop’s famous use of the phrase “city on a hill” to describe the new colony appears again and again in the book, most effectively when Vowell launches a scathing critique of Ronald Reagan’s many uses of it for purposes that would have been quite a surprise to Winthrop.
Vowell makes all of this interesting (although it’s interesting material to begin with, I think) by her sense of humor and her method of moving back and forth in time, making connections between what happened then and has happened since. She has a sarcastic, smart-ass tone that provides some laughs (I don’t have the book anymore, so I can’t give examples. unfortunately) and also keeps the narrative light and fast-moving. At times it’s a little glib for my taste, but the truth is, I don’t know of many history books written in such an amusing manner, so overall, I appreciated it. She also frequently jumps forward in time, sometimes to tell a lengthy story, such as her discussion of Ronald Reagan or her story of visiting Plymouth Plantation with some family members. She also uses contemporary references to help explain her points, such as her description of how American history gets portrayed on The Brady Bunch. It gets silly sometimes, but it’s also fun, and illuminating.
You can tell from my descriptions that I’m not a huge fan of Vowell’s sense of humor. My other complaint is that I would have liked a better sense of the book’s structure. There are no chapters, which means it’s hard to get a sense of the overall structure of the book — what its historical starting and ending points are and how the narrative elements are organized.
However, if you want a quick review of early American history, this is a great place to go, or if you want to know more about the Puritans and their legacy (again, without reading something longer and weightier), this book will suit you.