Kathryn Lofton reviews Sarah Vowell’s The Wordy Shipmates at Religion Dispatches:
The aching secularist has found storied higher ground in The Wordy Shipmates, where she applies her anti-cool cool to the tale of seventeenth-century Massachusetts Bay Colony and the settlers of the Great Migration. Like any good popular treatment, Vowell poses herself as a frontierswoman in a caricature. “By and large the Puritans are seen as laughable, written off as stupid, but in fact they’re intellectuals,” Vowell writes. The “typical Puritan spoilsport cartoon” is wrong because it makes Puritans seem priggish when in fact they were just bookish. And they weren’t just bookish, they were nice: “The New England Puritans are not remembered for their sweetness, and yet there was much sweetness in them.” This defensiveness has geek roots. Talking about The Wordy Shipmates, Vowell says her turn to a renewed Puritan was the result of a reader’s respect: “I felt like the Plymouth pilgrims and Salem Witch trial loonies are sort of the only ones who get any attention in American culture, and I’m most interested in the Boston ones sandwiched in the middle, who I feel are more interesting because of their writing.”
Read the full review here.