Rate this book

The Wordy Shipmates (2008)

by Sarah Vowell(Favorite Author)

3.64 of 5 Votes: 1

ISBN

1594489998 (ISBN13: 9781594489990)

languge

English

genre

Memoir & Autobiography

publisher

Riverhead Hardcover

review 1: I listened to this in audiobook format, and I really enjoyed it. Great narration. Vowell's reading is good in its own right, and mixing in other stars to read excerpts in voices is a nice touch.I love the way Vowell really digs into primary source materials for her works. It's really quite thoroughly done, and the way she draws connections is very insightful. I think this book is especially poignant, as it really sheds light on some of the core values that have shaped America to this day. Some of the reasons behind why I feel the way I do as an American, and regarding my place in the world.
review 2: I loved this book.Ok, so I love the complex, intensely intellectual, weird world of 17th century English Protestantism, when a whole bunch of ideas about the ... moreway the world did work and should work and could work were mixed in with intense biblical study and result was this passionate textual arguing and synthesising a set of sometimes strange and sometimes brilliant ideas. It was the discovery of this world, through Christopher Hill's The World Turned Upside Down, that gave me a lifelong interest in faith and ideas.But I knew nothing at all coming in about New England, beyond a cursory compulsory-for-my-degree study of Salem. I'd been dimly aware that some of the players in the English theological curves and turns disappeared to the New World at points in the narrative, and I had a basic handle on manifest-destiny, city-on-a-hill, but I'd never cared to follow further.So the book, clearly intended for an audience familiar with New England's founding myths but not with the theology, felt a bit upside down at times. I found myself stopping to look up x or y once or twice a chapter, leading to a nice spin-off effect for the reading.What I really loved though was Vowell's capacity to link this to living history, to draw the dots through the ages to how our past, and the ideas of our past in particular, shape who we are now. How a speech on a freezing pier leads us to Vietnam.I also admit to adoring the unabashed intellectualism of the book - not the pretentious, deliberately-obscure-verbosity-heavy style that passes for it - but the passion for delving deep, for being an expert, for giving a shit about what actually happenned - that is so very out of style now, but Vowell's capacity to coat it with humour make it palatable. I haven't read much more of Vowell's work, but if the tone is always lighter, I'm not sure I would love it as much. It takes courage to care and to think, and I want more, not less, in my readable history. less

Download links for: The Wordy Shipmates

Advertising