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Sarah Vowell, a popular contributor to public radio’s “This American Life,” is an American-history buff with a self-proclaimed predilection for Puritan New England, the Civil War, and bloodbaths. Hers is emphatically not the history taught in high school " often a target of her sarcastic wit.
Vowell is a master of the unexpected angle or pop-culture connection used to confer fresh relevance on often dowdy subjects.
In her new book, The Wordy Shipmates, one of her more outrageous parallels compares the Pequot war, in which 700 Indians were murdered in Mystic Fort, with a frustrated skateboarder’s “destructive tantrum.”
Vowell’s eponymous shipmates are the Puritans who settled the Massachusetts Bay Colony in 1630 " 10 years after the Mayflower Pilgrims settled Plymouth.
Why should we be interested in Protestants who fled Charles I during the Great Migration? Because “the country I live in is haunted by the Puritans’ vision of themselves as God’s chosen people, as a beacon of righteousness that all others are to admire,” Vowell writes.
What Vowell finds worrisome is that we have lost the Puritans’ humility and fear of God, which kept their egotism and delusions of grandeur in check. Even more troubling, we have also lost their respect for learning. Vowell asserts that the United States has veered away from the original bookishness of the Bay Colony in favor of the anti-intellectual, more emotional religion now practiced in America.
And I took out the critically acclaimed Lowboy from a Brooklynite author, John Wray.
