Sarah Vowell

My introduction to Sarah Vowell's work was kind of like when a friend of yours ("A") introduces you to another friend of theirs ("B") whom you've never met before, but A thinks you and B will get along splendidly. Such was my mindset in approaching this book: my dad, who gave me this book for Christmas, thought I would appreciate Sarah's insights and the way she writes. She is said to have a sharp, wry sense of humour, but not without a sympathetic side. I would tend to place myself in that show more kind of camp, so I had reasonably elevated expectations for this book, and happily my expectations were met. This is a great book.

The stories in this collection cover a wide variety of topics: Sarah shooting cannons with her dad, travelling the Trail of Tears with her sister, musing about the appeal of Frank Sinatra, exploring Goth culture, and recounting her obsession with The Godfather. Sarah writes very well, with very smooth sentences that flow by so quickly you don't realize you've read 100 pages already until you're interrupted. She's funny, but not often laugh-out-loud funny. Actually, I found myself nodding in agreement much more often than I laughed. I was enjoying the book perfectly well, but what really sold me on Sarah's work was the essay entitled "Drive Through Please".

This essay is about Sarah's fear of driving, and how it took her until the age of 28 to even contemplate learning how to drive properly. I too am terrified of the idea of driving, but Sarah expresses it far better than I could, especially when she talks about the contempt that people in our car-obsessed culture often display toward those of us who choose not to drive:

In the United States of America, ... if you have reached the age of seventeen without obtaining a driver's licence, you get used to The Look. Once a new acquaintance watches you buy beer with a passport, that person will ogle you with the kind of condescending, frightened glance usually reserved for unwed pregnant teenagers. Like you're not a person but instead a kind of sociological statistic, sucking the taxpayers with your moochy demands of food stamps and public transportation. I have seen that look. And, walking home from the grocery store laden with plastic bags, I have heard the voice, too, the voice screaming from the window of a Honda, graciously advising me to "get a f*cking car".

Later on, when she was finally learning how to drive, the part where she first encountered other cars on the road reminded me of my own aborted attempts at driving. "I have problems of my own without worrying about the other drivers," she says, and that pretty much sums up how I felt those few times I did actually drive a car. It sounds kind of trite to say, but Sarah really did speak to me with that piece.

Anyway, I shall conclude by saying that with the variety of topics Sarah covers in this book, there's bound to be something you identify with or at least feel strongly about, even if it comes in the form of disagreement. As for me, I've made a new literary friend and will happily spend more time with her work in future. show less

What do you get if you mix American history, breeziness, humor, sarcasm, and sassiness together? If you’re lucky, you may discover Sarah Vowell’s ASSASSINATION VACATION.
After watching Stephen Sondheim’s Assassins, a musical about the men who killed Presidents Abraham Lincoln, John Garfield, and William McKinley, Sarah Vowell took off to learn more about the men and the victims. She traveled the US to the locations of the murders, the burial sites, and anything else she could find out show more about the perpetrators.
Along the way, she learned about some similarities and differences among the three events. She wrote: “It’s one of the perks of assassination. In death, you get upgraded into a saint no matter how much people hated you in life.”
“I am only slightly less astonished by the egotism of the assassins, the inflated self-esteem it requires to kill a president, than I am astonished by the men who run for president. These are the people who have the gall to believe they can fix us–us and our deficit, our fossil fuels, our racism, poverty, our potholes and public schools.”
She writes about Dr. Samuel Mudd who treated Booth and was later called a conspirator. Was he innocent or guilty?
A Missouri state senator complimented a Southern Magazine for setting the record straight and defending Confederate leaders. That man, John Ashcroft, later became the U.S. Attorney General.
Charles J. Guiteau would later claim he was not responsible for Garfield’s death; Garfield’s doctors were. Technically, he was right.
She elaborates on some strange coincidences. Among them: Robert Todd Lincoln was closely associated with all three events. (In German, todd means death.) Booth was physically close to Lincoln on several occasions. He was even on the podium behind him when he delivered his second inaugural address.
“When I told a friend I was writing about the McKinley administration, he...asked” why anyone would want to read about that?” “Oh, I don’t know...Maybe because we seem to be reliving it.” She continues to prove that those who do not remember history are condemned to relive it: Samuel Tilden received more popular votes than Rutherford B. Hayes. In January 1877, the Republicans on the electoral commission “persuaded the Democrats to ‘elect’ Hayes by agreeing to end reconstruction. (Hard to believe that the candidate who lost the popular vote could actually become the president of the United States. Luckily, that kind of travesty never happened again.)”
More turmoil erupted during the 1880 election when U.S. Grant was seeking a third term. “I’ll admit I rolled my eyes at the ideological hairsplitting, wondering how a group of people who more or less agreed with one another abut most issues could summon forth such stark animosity. Thankfully, we Americans have evolved, our hearts made larger, our minds more open, welcoming the negligible differences among our fellows with compassion and respect.”
Among her tidbits of information was “Slavery...wasn’t a European import but native to American shores.” The north was also involved as it sought to get molasses and rum.
“Maryland, My Maryland” was written in 1861 but was not the official state song until 1939. It includes lines including “sic semper!”, a reference to the state’s motto, “Sic semper tyrannis” the words hollered by John Wilkes Booth, calls Lincoln a despot, and refers to the North as “scum.” When he bombed the Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City in 1995, Timothy McVeigh wore a T-shirt with a picture of Lincoln on the front as well as the words, “Sic semper tyrannis.” The shirt instantly became a big seller.
On June 9, 1863, “Just as the pallbearers were carrying [Edwin Booth’s] coffin out the door in New York, in Washington, three floors of Ford’s Theater collapsed...It had been turned into a government office building after the Lincoln assassination. Twenty-two federal employees died.
At the time Garfield ran for President, the best paid government job? New York Custom House collectors. “The Custom House collected two-thirds of the federal government’s revenue.”
The employees, especially the director, were free to siphon off their share first.
“The sad thing about Garfield’s eleven volumes of Sumner’s Works”is that it’s a fifteen-volume set.”
McKinley felt the best thing the US could do for the Filipinos was to “educate, uplift, and Christianize them.” He ignored the fact that most were already Christian because of the Spanish missionaries who arrived in 1565 to convert them to Catholicism.
What really caused the explosion on the U.S. battleship, the Maine which lead to the Spanish-American War?
Vowell spent time talking with tour guides and was able to learn a lot more about her subjects than that given in the typical tour. She did this not by private interviews but by asking questions during the tours.
ASSASSINATION VACATION was a delightful, informative history lesson. I highly recommend it to anyone interested in history, particularly the presidential assassinations, who doesn’t want to wade through a lot of boring, fleshless words. For those who aren’t history buffs, you’ll probably enjoy it as well for its writing style and presentation of information you didn’t think you’d care about. show less

Take the Cannoli: Stories From the New World - Sarah Vowell   I can already tell I'm going to want to read this again. Essays, I love them. Plus, in my mind, I can hear Vowell as she must have sounded on This American Life, which is where most of these began. There's a few bits of growing-up interspersed throughout, a lot of history, the blackest of humor. Great stuff, perhaps especially on the Trail of Tears and how many different emotions that trip spawned.
So much humor, though.
On the show more one hand, I think Vowell would be an awesome friend to hang with, laughing at Choo-Choo and working it into every comment because of the way it sounds ("spleen" is a personal fave) on the other, she would someday drag me along on the least appealing road trip ever. Hotspots of the Teapot Dome scandal? Tippecanoe? Some other phrase I only dimly recall from American history, but can't actually place in time or space? She's already done The Hall of Presidents, so I'd be clear of that one. Yet no matter how little the idea would appeal to me, she'd make it fascinating: full of humor and humanity. Maybe we can just get her and Kate Beaton and Bill Bryson to filter all of history for us?
Library copy show less

I have been a fan of Sarah Vowell since hearing her little girl fights squeaky door voice on NPR a decade ago or more. Upon hearing her voice delivering one of her essays, it is virtually impossible not to hear it as you read her. While the voice is unique, it is the flow that really stays with you. As a reader, you know where the pauses fit and why and where to rush ahead a little before catching your breathe again after a well delivered punch line. Essays about her childhood invariably show more touch on some aspect of American history, while her essays about history reveal that America is a family that we are all a part of for better or ill. She has a great way to sum up the often conflicting emotions we have about families and history in her essay about the forced Indian migration known as The Trail of Tears: "When I think about my relationship with America, I feel like a battered wife. Yeah, he knocks me around a lot, but boy, he sure can dance." This book TAKE THE CANNOLI is a collection of her earlier works. Some I had heard on the radio but I did not mind visiting them again. Though the work is often topical, it does not suffer with the passing of time or the passing away of cultural reference points. This is a testament to the precision of her prose. She stays with the humorous marrow even when the flesh has been gleaned from the historical bones. Highly recommend anything she has written though this is probably more accessible than some of her more history centric works like THE PARTLY CLOUDY PATRIOT and THE WORDY SHIPMATES--both of which I love. show less