The Wordy Shipmates

by Sarah Vowell
The Wordy Shipmates
book data
2,205 ratings, 3.49 average rating, 782 reviews (more data...)
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published
October 7th 2008 by Riverhead Hardcover

binding
Hardcover, 254 pages

isbn
1594489998    (isbn13: 9781594489990)

description
From the New York Times bestselling author of Assassination Vacation and The Partly Cloudy Patriot, an examination of the Puritans, their covenant com...more




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Kim
08/01/08
Kim rated it: 3 of 5 stars

Read in February, 2009
Okay, here goes:


I’m torn on The Wordy Shipmates. I’m still a relative newbie to Sarah Vowell. With Assassination Vacation, I had that new love vibe going on. All that gushy ‘You’re so awesome, I’m so glad that I found you, where have you been all my life’ feeling. With The Partly Cloudy Patriot, I moved to that next step in a relationship, where you start to learn about the person and some of it reminds you why you fell in love and then sometimes it’s all like...more
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Lauren
07/09/08
Lauren rated it: 2 of 5 stars

Read in October, 2008
I can hardly believe that I'm going to write these words: I did not enjoy The Wordy Shipmates. Anyone who knows me and my love of Sarah Vowell will be *shocked* by this, as am I. But that fact remains that I found it boring. A slog. Too totally Puritanical.

I know what she was attempting to do - put a human face on the Puritans who founded the Massachusetts Bay Colony, draw parallels to our modern evangelical (this that phrase an oxymoron?) Christian country, and make sharp dist...more
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  3 comments

Nicholas Merlin Karpuk
Read in December, 2008
Sarah Vowell's quirky 12 year old voice almost requires me to read her books in audio form. This is the second book of Vowell's I've purchased in audio format, and beyond some of the glitches (damn you iTunes!) it's the preferred way to go.

This book is probably the driest thing I've ever read by Vowell. Normally her The American Life bits and her previous books are a lot more anecdote-heavy, which was always a major selling point. She has a knack for taking some really diverse topics...more
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Jeff
11/09/08
Jeff rated it: 4 of 5 stars

Read in January, 2009
recommended to Jeff by: My brain.
recommends it for: People who like belt buckles on things other than their belts.
To love me is to know me, and to know me, is to know that I love Sarah Vowell. I think it was my good friend Kelsey who said, "You have to read this book!" She was talking about Take the Cannoli. I read it, and I loved it. Then I read Partly Cloudy Patriot, and loved it as well. I listened to This American Life almost religiously in the hopes of hearing one of her radio essays. So when I heard her read a snippet of The Wordy Shipmates on This American Life a couple of years ago-...more
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Imogen
10/08/08
Imogen rated it: 4 of 5 stars

Read in October, 2008
I think it's funny how there's always a moment during a Sarah Vowell book where I go, 'oh yeah! She just writes american history!' It came pretty early on in this one, too.

This is not my favorite of her books. It's a lot more american history, and a lot less Sarah Vowell being a smartass about american history, than I prefer. I mean, I was into it, and I finished it, and I kept all the Puritans whose names begin with Ws straight, but I don't know. The whole appeal of Sarah Vowell fo...more
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Erin F. B.
07/28/08
Erin F. B. rated it: 2 of 5 stars

bookshelves: non-fiction
Read in August, 2008
That's what I get for saying I was on a roll of great books. And I wanted so much to like this and I did like it for quite some time. Having just visited Boston, it was great to learn about the founding of it, especially those little tidbits that only Sarah Vowell seems to know.
I just got to the end and felt there was no point. The Puritans came to the New World to escape persecution only to persecute each other and the native people they encountered...we all know that story. I guess...more
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Spiros
07/26/08
Spiros rated it: 3 of 5 stars

bookshelves: arc
Read in August, 2008
recommends it for: those who enjoy a healthy dose of humor with their outrage
Sarah Vowell is of Cherokee descent, and was raised in a Pentecostal community. This would, to a large degree, explain her fascination with Puritans. I am of Catholic descent, and could give two shits whether there is such an entity as God or not. This would, to an equally large degree, explain my total uninterest in Puritans; they didn't eradicate my ancestors, and they had no part in shaping my weltanschaung. To the extent that I regard them at all, I think of them as a bunch of kooks, a benig...more
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Shelly
01/26/09
Shelly rated it: 2 of 5 stars

bookshelves: listened-to-on-ipod
The only Sarah Vowell I've ever "read," was/is _Take the Cannoli_. All my other exposure to her writing has been via audio: _Assassination Vacation_, _The Partly Cloudy Patriot_, and now _The Wordy Shipmates_. I have to admit, sadly, that I was let down. Generally the audio versions of her books are so good. They feature readers like Conan O'Brien, Jon Stewart, and (my personal hero) David Cross. And while the audio version for "Shipmates" does feature the likes of Bill Hader...more
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  6 comments

Nomi
12/09/08
Nomi rated it: 1 of 5 stars

bookshelves: nonfiction
Read in December, 2008
This is an interesting topic but I could only take so much of the author's hipster style of writing with her constant tangents and editorializing on personal revelations and pop culture references. This might make a decent essay or (gasp!) blog entry but as a full-length book it's not up to snuff. (I think it's possible to write engagingly and critically about history for the general public without boring us to tears and without sacrificing sentence structure and content.) Of course if you're lo...more
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Jackie "the Librarian"
08/01/08
Jackie "the Librarian" rated it: 3 of 5 stars

bookshelves: history, humor, non-fiction
Read in March, 2009
This is NOT as easy-reading as Sarah Vowell's other books. Instead of having multiple topics, Sarah focuses on just one, the Massachusetts Bay pilgrims, who came after the more famous Plymouth Rock ones.

She digs into this dry subject, and while managing to make her usual wry observations, reading quotations from Governor Winthrop and other colonists isn't as fast going as her usual conversational style.
The topics are serious stuff - the colony's precarious independent rule as ...more
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  5 comments

Alicia
07/26/08
Alicia rated it: 4 of 5 stars

bookshelves: essays, light-reads, nonfic
Read in July, 2008
It seemed this book got off to a slow start, detailing the origins of the Church of England (blah blah Henry VIII divorce blah beheading blah) rather than focusing on Vowell's own plenty-fascinating experiences with historical reverberations in the present moment. But then John Winthrop sets sail with the Massachusetts Bay Colony, and things get very detailed very fast. I got a little dizzy, frankly.

Moreover: in this book, and thanks to Sarah Vowell's historical diligence, there exis...more
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Randomanthony
08/01/08
Randomanthony rated it: 3 of 5 stars

In The Wordy Shipmates Ms. Vowell half, or maybe three-quarters, succeeds with the transformation from memoirist with a history bend to a historian who occasionally injects her own story into the text. Vowell comes off like a particularly accessible high school teacher giving a series of lectures on early American history. She works hard to enliven the past and connect the implications to the modern world. Her passion for the subject is apparent, but I could have used more conventional histor...more
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Alan
12/02/08
Alan rated it: 3 of 5 stars

Read in December, 2008
Sarah Vowell specializes in what might be called "jokey popular history." She's serious about her subject but she tries to wrap it up in a -- well duh! style of writing interspersed with many personal asides, some relevant, some not.
Here, she writes about the founding of the colonies of Massachusetts and Rhode Island and the colorful characters who inspired them. This quickly draws her into abstruse theological differences that today seem highly irrelevant. But she succeeds in d...more
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  1 comment

Hans
12/08/08
Hans rated it: 4 of 5 stars

bookshelves: history
Read in December, 2008
You never really learn much about the history of the American colonies post-thanksgiving through pre-Salem witch trials. This book fills that gap. I think the most provocative thing about this book is how puritan culture still permeates through-out the American Psyche to this day. Much of American attitudes and culture were all founded upon the principles that governed the lives of those original founders. This influence can be felt in how Americans view many issues ranging from gay marriage t...more
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Andy
01/10/09
Andy rated it: 2 of 5 stars

Read in December, 2008
Vowell's book rates as anecdotal pop history at its most average. I'll give her credit, she tries pretty hard to make this - the story of the founding of the Massachusetts Bay Colony - appeal to a wide audience. There's a good deal of clever wordplay and an engaging, 'gee isn't that strange' sense of humor; and she makes a point of drawing lots of parallels to our present-day social and political idiosyncrasies, some of which are interesting. But I was constantly annoyed that Vowell doesn't try ...more
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  1 comment

Allison
11/08/08
Allison rated it: 5 of 5 stars

Read in November, 2008
recommended to Allison by: my friend scott recommended the author
recommends it for: anyone who likes history
i loved this book. i will never think about puritans the same way, and i can't wait to read more about roger williams and anne hutchison. i also look forward to reading more books by sarah vowell.
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Jen
01/20/09
Jen rated it: 2 of 5 stars

bookshelves: didnt-finish
Read in January, 2009
Reading Sarah Vowell always makes feel like such an a-hole. I think she's so so funny and I love listening to her on NPR. Unfortunately, I am totally unable to stick it through one of her books. Always, always, always I make it about 1/4 of the way in and can't finish. It's funny, because while I'm reading that first fourth I'm totally down -- I read aloud sentences, I look up the people she's writing about, etc. but I always get distracted by her asides and find myself coming up with my own asi...more
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Janice
10/16/08
Janice rated it: 4 of 5 stars

bookshelves: -his-tory
recommends it for: moms. and others
my one problem with this book was this: considering that i could "listen" to sarah vowell all day long, the fact that she included no chapter breaks meant that i looked up from this book to realize that i hadn't gotten out of bed yet, and that the day had driven headlong into what could almost be described as evening. heavy price to pay for a few pages over coffee.
and i suppose that, really, that is no problem at all; except that the lack of chapters also seemed, in this case,...more
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Jbeg
12/02/08
Jbeg rated it: 3 of 5 stars

I feel frankly terrible about giving this one only 3 stars, which is like a pentacostal giving Jesus 3 stars. The book is smart, funny, well-researched. But it never really hit the high notes of ASSASSINATION VACATION, in part because unlike that earlier masterpiece here Vowell is essentially teaching a really good class instead of putting together a remarkable book. That is, where AV tackled her travels across various moments in history and spots on the landscape with her sister and her nephew...more
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Chad
10/12/08
Chad rated it: 4 of 5 stars

bookshelves: non-fiction-history
Read in October, 2008
This book barely scrapes by with four stars, based mostly on the duel facts that I've become a pretty big history buff in recent years, and that I happen to think Sarah Vowell is pretty neat.

If you're not a fan of Vowell, I can't really see myself recommending this book to you. Its a rather meandering account of the Puritan's early attempts to sculpt the Massachusetts Bay Colony from the new American wilderness, using only their tough puritan work ethic and their oppresively burdens...more
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The Wordy Shipmates (Audio CD)
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