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The Wordy Shipmates | 
 enlarge | Author: Sarah Vowell
Publisher: Riverhead Hardcover
Category: Book
List Price: $25.95
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Rating:  83 reviews
Sales Rank: 1382
Media: Hardcover
Pages: 272
Number Of Items: 1
Shipping Weight (lbs): 0.8
Dimensions (in): 8.4 x 5.7 x 1.1
ISBN: 1594489998
Dewey Decimal Number: 974.0882859
EAN: 9781594489990
ASIN: 1594489998
Publication Date: October 7, 2008
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Product Description
The Wordy Shipmates is New York Times bestselling author Sarah Vowell s exploration of the Puritans and their journey to America to become the people of John Winthrop s city upon a hill a shining example, a city that cannot be hid.
To this day, America views itself as a Puritan nation, but Vowell investigates what that means and what it should mean. What was this great political enterprise all about? Who were these people who are considered the philosophical, spiritual, and moral ancestors of our nation? What Vowell discovers is something far different from what their uptight shoe-buckles-and- corn reputation might suggest. The people she finds are highly literate, deeply principled, and surprisingly feisty. Their story is filled with pamphlet feuds, witty courtroom dramas, and bloody vengeance. Along the way she asks:
* Was Massachusetts Bay Colony governor John Winthrop a communitarian, a Christlike Christian, or conformity s tyrannical enforcer? Answer: Yes!
* Was Rhode Island s architect, Roger Williams, America s founding freak or the father of the First Amendment? Same difference.
* What does it take to get that jezebel Anne Hutchinson to shut up? A hatchet.
* What was the Puritans pet name for the Pope? The Great Whore of Babylon.
Sarah Vowell s special brand of armchair history makes the bizarre and esoteric fascinatingly relevant and fun. She takes us from the modern-day reenactment of an Indian massacre to the Mohegan Sun casino, from old-timey Puritan poetry, where righteousness is rhymed with wilderness, to a Mayflower-themed waterslide. Throughout, The Wordy Shipmates is rich in historical fact, humorous insight, and social commentary by one of America s most celebrated voices. Thou shalt enjoy it.
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| Customer Reviews: Read 78 more reviews...
A little-- well-- wordy... October 3, 2008
L. F. Smith (E. Wenatchee, WA)
38 out of 40 found this review helpful
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.
 educational but a flawed argument October 16, 2008
cait (N.J., United States)
28 out of 37 found this review helpful
What do you think of when you think of the Puritans? Bucket hats, brass buckle shoes and Thanksgiving pageants? If so, Sarah Vowell thinks you are a bit confused. Her book is not about those religious separatists that landed on Plymouth Rock, but rather the loyal British citizens who founded the Massachusetts Bay colony in 1630, a very different people. A very literate, principled group that would found the first college in what would become the United States, Harvard. An intellectual people obsessed with words and language, Greek and Latin and the classics and most of all by the Bible. Hence the title of the book, The Wordy Shipmates.
Also, beside correcting that misapprehension, Vowell wants to explore what their heritage has meant to us as a nation, especially the idea that their leader, Governor John Winthrop, discussed in his "A Model of Christian Charity", the idea that they were to be "a city upon a hill". She gives examples of how that idea was used, and in her estimation, was misused, to shape Americas' idea of herself and to justify her actions throughout history.
Vowell herself seems conflicted by this very 'city on the hill' idea. On the one hand she sees it as dangerous and arrogant, the idea of the Puritans that they, and by her logic we today, feel that we are a superior people, chosen by God to lead, a "beacon of righteousness that all others are to admire". Their strict Calvinist theology led them to believe that they were predestined to be superior, certainly to the Native Americans, who they saw as waiting on the shore for the Puritan's help when they arrived. But then, as Vowell acknowledges, these ideas are totally at odds with the ideas of the Founding Fathers less than 150 years later, the ideas contained in the Declaration of Independence, in the Constitution, in the Bill of Rights...in the very idea of the American Dream.
"We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness."
More than that, I think there is a problem with her basic premise that America thinks of itself in some way as a Puritan nation. The very ideals the country was founded on were at odds with the strict predestination theology of the Massachusetts Bay colony. Then the history of Massachusetts itself, while important in America, was certainly not the only intellectual influence, even at the beginning of our nation. And that is not to even mention the hundreds of years of huge immigrations to our country from all over the world, bringing a breath of cultural and religious and intellectual ideals that the Puritans could not even have imagined.
So, at times an amusing book, that certainly left me with an increased knowledge about the Puritans and the founding of Massachusetts but also a bit of a confusing and overblown jumble, punctuated by a few political tirades I found jarring to the argument, with a premise that just didn't hold up.
great as history; not stellar as social commentary October 4, 2008
I. Tysoe (Earth)
24 out of 27 found this review helpful
The point Sarah Vowell hopes to make with her book is condensed in its three opening sentences: "The only thing more dangerous than an idea is a belief. And by dangerous I don't mean thought-provoking. I mean: might get people killed." In many ways the book aims to be a modern social commentary that tells us about all the terrible things that happened to and in the United States and the world because some Puritans hopped on a boat and came here.
We elected Bush? That's Anne Hutchinson's fault. And not just because Bush is a descendant of hers either. Had it not been for Anne's ideas, most American Protestants would not now believe in "immediate personal revelation" (p. 209)--the idea (radical at the time) that individuals have a personal relationship with God and that, as a result, only the individual is responsible for his or her own salvation. In other words, had it not been for Anne, there would have been no born-again Christians and, hence, no George Bush.
Our (often disastrous) interventions around the world? Blame Winthrop of "City on a Hill" fame. Had he not drummed into us that we're a city on a hill, a model to the world, we might be less eager to spread our model from one corner of the globe to the next. And, in any event, we might not have had Ronald Reagan as president. (I suspect Sarah Vowell might be a Democrat by the way.)
The Indian massacres? That too is the Puritans' fault. But here Sarah Vowell does not have to rely on genealogy or one man or woman's belief system to prove her point. The Puritans, after all, massacred many Indians. Like the Pequot, whose children, women, and men they literally burned alive. This book is thus worth reading if all you want are the details of what happened after Thanksgiving.
But this book is also worth reading because as Sarah Vowell ruefully admits, "I wish I did not identify with [the Puritans'] essential questions" (p. 29). But she does. She does not say it outright but she seems to feel that at least part of the belief system that made those Puritans sail to America was a sense of social justice. The Puritans resurrected (in the Christian world) the Hebrew ideas of: isomania (we should all be equal before the law), literacy (we should all be able to read the law--or the Bible), free speech (we should be able to denounce authority), and manual labor (we should all earn our bread by the sweat of our brows). And this belief gave us not just Bush, Reagan and the massacres of Native Americans but also Martin Luther King, Jr.
And because she recognizes the good that came (with the much-detailed) bad, Sarah Vowell gives us a thoughtful and detailed translation of what the Puritans were up to. She makes the language and the politics of the 1600s understandable to the reader of 2008. And not only understandable but fun to read. And so we enjoy learning about the disagreements the Puritans had with the Pope, the Anglicans and with each other; we get the political implications the Bible had for them; we understand the importance Winthrop's "Christian Charity" sermon had for his contemporaries (and Sarah Vowell admits, for her). We (or at least I) learned a lot reading this book and what is more I enjoyed learning it.
The final verdict then? As social commentary, this book is not much different from many others like it (say Michael Moore); as history of the Puritan era though it is a resounding success. I recommend it.
 The pre-modern side of Puritan New England October 2, 2008
Jean E. Pouliot (Newburyport, MA United States)
23 out of 27 found this review helpful
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.
Sarah Vowell Does It Again! September 28, 2008
Jim M. (Springfield MA)
22 out of 30 found this review helpful
Sarah Vowell is one of my favorite writers. She writes in such a way that makes history fun and interesting, even if you haven't studied it since high school.
THE WORDY SHIPMATES continues this trend. It focuses on the Puritans, the wave of settlers to Massachusetts who followed the Pilgrims. They were led by John Winthrop who is probably best known for coining the term "City on a hill" made famous by several Presidents, including Reagan. Vowell also writes about Roger Williams (who after being exiled from Massachusetts, settles Rhode Island), Anne Hutchinson, and the Native Americans.
Like her previous work, this is a highly entertaining read. You feel her enthusiasm for the time period. As I stated, even those who don't normally read history will find this fascinating.
This may end up being my favorite book this year.
I can't wait to read what she writes next.
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