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Loading... The Wordy Shipmates (2008)by Sarah Vowell
  
Penguin Random House (48) LT picks: Blue Books (130) No current Talk conversations about this book.   ) cdaley | Nov 2, 2023 |  ) nogomu | Oct 19, 2023 | ) rebwaring | Aug 14, 2023 | This was a good pick, and fascinating, especially along "it was ever thus" lines -- just that it seems to be built in to the human condition to argue about doctrine and splinter and faction -- or is that just the legacy we've inherited here in the U.S. from the Puritans and we THINK it is universal? We spent a lot of our time really trying to wrap our heads around Calvinism and what the motivation is for doing ANYTHING if your salvation/damnation is already predetermined and there is nothing you can do about it? The back-and-forth shifting in time as various threads of the story are followed and then backtracking to another was a little more bewildering/frustrating in this book than in some of Vowell's others -- where many readers could be expected to have SOME grasp of the timeline to begin with. Overall a very worthwhile read. (  ) greeniezona | Aug 1, 2023 | ) robfwalter | Jul 31, 2023 |
 Maybe there's something to be said for learning about the pilgrims, after all—especially from an instructor as entertaining as Vowell.  As always with Vowell, her commentary is apt and frequently, startlingly insightful. I would suggest that this book might well be used as a sort of introductory text to the ideas of the Puritans particularly for undergraduates. Because she engages so cleverly with popular culture, it may help provide a successful approach to the dense and highly intellectualized writing of this group of Puritans. For the nonspecialist in this period, the book could serve as a reminder of what continues to be so fascinating about the ideas of the New England Puritans of the seventeenth century and the impact their thought continues to have in popular discourse.  Sarah Vowell is a problem. She’s a problem like Sarah Palin, Cyndi Lauper and Kathy Griffin. She’s annoying. Or, really, she’s double-annoying, because she styles herself as annoying — provocative-annoying — and if you become annoyed by her you seem to be conceding the point. She’s gotten to you. Take “The Wordy Shipmates,” her fifth book. Vowell has integrated her sarcasm, flat indie-girl affect and kitsch worship — refined in print and on public radio — into a pop history of the Massachusetts Bay Colony. Known for her adenoid-helium voice, Vowell is a genial talker but an undisciplined writer. This new book mixes jiggers of various weak liquors — paraphrase, topical one-liners, blogger tics — and ends up tasting kind of festive but bad, like Long Island iced tea. Drawing on letters, essays, and sermons, Vowell offers a penetrating look at the tensions between John Winthrop, John Cotton, Roger Williams, Anne Hutchinson, and others as they argued about the role of religion in government and everyday life. They saw themselves as God's chosen people, a credo that set the tone for American history and notions of manifest destiny that have led to all manner of imposition on other lands and cultures. But they also vehemently debated separation of church and state and founded Harvard, even as they pondered the destiny of what Winthrop referred to as the "shining city on the hill "A book dense with detail, insight, and humor. At times dense, at times silly, at times surpassingly wise. AwardsDistinctions
From the author of the "New York Times" bestseller "Assassination Vacation" comes an examination of the Puritans, their covenant communities, deep-rooted idealism, political and cultural relevance, and their myriad oddities.
To this day, America views itself as a Puritan nation, but author 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.--From publisher description. No library descriptions found. |
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 Google Books — Loading...GenresMelvil Decimal System (DDC)974.00882859History and Geography North America Northeastern U.S.LC ClassificationRatingAverage: (3.66)
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