The Hose Book Club: The Wordy Shipmates

People usually don’t try to discuss history books in book clubs. It is very hard; what are you going to do? Fact check? Comment heavily on prose? Yawn! Who wants to do that in a book club, virtual or otherwise? The reason we are discussing Sarah Vowell’s The Wordy Shipmates is because I read this review for it in the NY Times. This Virginia Heffernan person is clearly humorless but I wondered if there was some truth in her argument. Are we who enjoy this stuff somehow part of this massive poseur conspiracy of entitled liberals sipping free trade coffee and finding new and inventive ways to ironically study the founding fathers just to sound more interesting at cocktail parties? I wonder if we and more generally the people who listen to “This American Life” are just plain trying too hard. Thoreau said that “The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation”. Maybe he got it wrong. Maybe, we are not that quiet at all. Maybe everyone around us is to busy desperately listening to NPR podcasts on their iPods to notice anyone else. It could be our very own little Matrix...

I say no, I say that’s nonsense. This book is preposterously enjoyable. Other historians, such as Doris Kearns Goodwin, have it easy. Abraham Lincoln and his cabinet of the manically insecure (Salmon P. Chase) and elitist, east coast dandies (xTian…I mean William H. Seward) are totally fascinating and have an insurrection as a backdrop just to keep things moving along. Even Evil could make that interesting. Ms. Vowell spent the entirety of Assassination Vacation wandering around the US pointing why a relative of John Wilkes Booth has a statue in Gramercy Park and staring at street corners in D.C. where assassination plots were hatching hoping to catch inspiration. Somehow it works. Her premise is that the notion of American Exceptionalism firmly ties the United States to its Puritan roots. Focusing on how the Puritans that came to America took the idea of John Winthrop’s “City on a Hill” to heart and pursued a vigorous intellectual debate on the topic of this shared responsibility to a completely preposterous end, in the case of Roger Williams anyway, Vowell tells a compelling story that made thoroughly entertaining and enhanced by her use of punchy, colorful language. Does it go too far? Sure, Anne Hutchinson is not a “Puritan Oprah” but it is funny to imagine her as such and if you can stop giggling enough to read around it you might actually learn something. This is the AP History Class I always wished I sat in if Aaron Sorkin went and re-imagined it for TV.

So I enjoyed The Wordy Shipmates and I think Virgina Heffernan is a killjoy. There may of course be a deep rooted reason for this. Simultaneously to reading this book, I also picked up Shakespeare Wrote for Money - a collection of essays by Nick Hornby on his reading fetish originally published in the Believer Magazine. It just so happened that Vowell wrote the introduction. Towards the end of the introduction, Ms. Vowell chastising herself for not being more like Hornby; devouring all books in sight and how instead she spent a lot of time watching episodes of Battlestar Galactica. I have the exact same problem. If she is a faux-indie girl full of pretense then maybe I am as well. I’ve been called worse things

Full Disclosure - I hate NY’s NPR station, but I am also that dude. I has listened to NPR stations across the country and actually have an opinion one way or the other. WNYC is legitimately lame so I never listen to this American Life on the radio. I do listen to the podcasts at night, to help me sleep. It’s an important part of my life, but my reasons why very closely resemble damning something with faint praise so I usually avoid talking about it.