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A Voyage Long and Strange: Rediscovering the New World by Tony Horwitz
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A Voyage Long and Strange: Rediscovering the New World

by Tony Horwitz

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4251510,461 (3.88)21
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Horwitz tracks down and follows the actual steps of the many early explorer's who came to the U.S. before the Pilgrims, the Vikings, the Spaniards, and the Jamestown settlements. ( )
mojomomma | Feb 6, 2009 |  
DCYAA
JohnMeeks | Feb 2, 2009 |  
Tony Horwitz might be accused of relying on a gimmick...

Read the rest of my review at http://www.contrarymagazine.com/Contr...
lmbrowning | Oct 11, 2008 |  
A fun history lesson. Horwitz combines research on 16th century explorers in the Americas with his own retracing of their routes. He is a colorful, engagin writer. ( )
bertonek | Sep 25, 2008 |  
When the Pilgrims arrived in Massachusetts in 1620, they were greeted in English by the Indian Samoset, who asked them for a beer. Thus begins Tony Horwitz’s debunking of America’s foundational myths, along with the account of his own attempt to retrace the footsteps of the earliest explorers in the New World.

Like his book “Confederates in the Attic,” Horwitz blends historical revelations of the past with impressions from the present, the latter gained through a great deal of courage, audacity, and humor. And like the former book, Horwitz doesn’t make a complete survey of the period under study, but gives us a soupcon; just enough of a taste to interest us in finding out more on our own.

He starts at Plymouth Rock, and then takes a step backwards in time, to Norse explorers and then to Columbus, who upon arriving at San Salvador, knelt and thanked God “who had requited them after a voyage so long and strange.” Columbus left with some souvenirs (i.e., natives) and began going back and forth between Spain and the Caribbean, always looking for riches. He never found them in the New World, but did manage to decimate the native population.

Other Spanish would-be conquerors in search of gold followed, and moved up into the American South and Southwest. Horowitz takes a car trip that follows the paths of Coronado and De Soto, and learns about the surprising areas explored by them as well as the cruelties they committed en route. He stops at Jamestown and Roanoke, and tells us what he learns about Sir Walter Raleigh, John Smith, and Pocahontas (not much of it resembling the stories currently promulgated). (Pocahontas, for example, was only ten years old when John Smith arrived; it was John Rolfe she married, and not necessarily on a voluntary basis.)

Horwitz isn’t given to deep analysis; he devotes a sentence or two to the racism behind behaviors towards the Indians, and a few paragraphs to the importance of myths that retain their hold on people in spite of facts indicating otherwise. Americans don’t so much *study* history, he claims, as *shop* for it. “The past (is) a consumable, subject to the national preference for familiar products.”

But Horwitz still has fun, as do his readers, even while uncovering some bitter truths. If this results in more people becoming aware of more history, who can complain? ( )
nbmars | Sep 17, 2008 |  
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People/Characters
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Important events
Awards and honors
Epigraph
"Mistakes . . . are the portals of discovery." James Joyce, Ulysses

"Pray look better, sir," quoth Sancho, "those things yonder are no giants, but windmills." Miguel de Cervantes, Don Quixote
Dedication
To Erica and Josh, bread in the backseat sandwich of our childhood travels.
First words
The pilgrims didn't think much of Cape Cod.
Quotations
Last words
(Click to show. Warning: May contain spoilers.)
Disambiguation notice
Publisher's editors
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Book description

Amazon.com Product Description (ISBN 0805076034, Hardcover)

The bestselling author of Blue Latitudes takes us on a thrilling and eye-opening voyage to pre-Mayflower America

On a chance visit to Plymouth Rock, Tony Horwitz realizes he’s mislaid more than a century of American history, from Columbus’s sail in 1492 to Jamestown’s founding in 16-oh-something. Did nothing happen in between? Determined to find out, he embarks on a journey of rediscovery, following in the footsteps of the many Europeans who preceded the Pilgrims to America.

An irresistible blend of history, myth, and misadventure, A Voyage Long and Strange captures the wonder and drama of first contact. Vikings, conquistadors, French voyageurs—these and many others roamed an unknown continent in quest of grapes, gold, converts, even a cure for syphilis. Though most failed, their remarkable exploits left an enduring mark on the land and people encountered by late-arriving English settlers.

Tracing this legacy with his own epic trek—from Florida’s Fountain of Youth to Plymouth’s sacred Rock, from desert pueblos to subarctic sweat lodges—Tony Horwitz explores the revealing gap between what we enshrine and what we forget. Displaying his trademark talent for humor, narrative, and historical insight, A Voyage Long and Strange allows us to rediscover the New World for ourselves.

(retrieved from Amazon Fri, 24 Apr 2009 07:58:19 -0400)

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