I love Sarah Vowell. I do. With this book complete, I believe I have all of her books except the newly released Lafayette in the Somewhat United States. However, there is something to be said for reading books in a timely manner, or reading them in publication order. I hadn’t ever really worried about that with Ms. Vowell’s books, but Take the Cannoli is one of her earlier works and is an anthology. They are in some cases slightly dated, or I’ve read them (or […]
Everyone Give it up for America’s Favorite Fighting Frenchman
Like many people, I’ve been listening to the Hamilton soundtrack non-stop and learning more about the American Revolutionary War than I ever did in school. Lafayette is easily one of the coolest characters in the musical, but also in real life. I’d been meaning to get to one of Sarah Vowell’s books, so when she published Lafayette in the Somewhat United States in October, it was kismet. Vowell tells the story of the teenaged Marquis de Lafayette leaving his family in France to join the […]
Road Trip!
One of y’all recommended this one, and I can’t remember who it was, but thank you. It was a great read and I’m definitely going to see if the library has anything else by this author, because she cracked me up. “Except for the people who were there that one day they discovered the polio vaccine, being part of history is rarely a good idea. History is one war after another with a bunch of murders and natural disasters in between.” So Sarah Vowell kind […]
Lincoln was late to his own assassination.
There’s something about the way Sarah Vowell writes about history that brings it to life for me. Probably because there’s something about the way that Sarah Vowell writes about people, and history is made of people. It often doesn’t feel that way. (Ironically, there’s a section in here where she tells a story about a time where she ended up yelling at some guy in a supermarket about how the only time it would be interesting to live through history would be if you were […]
These Shipmates Were a Tad Too Wordy
The Wordy Shipmates is pretty true to Sarah Vowell form: chatty historical memoir. Her style in this book reminds me of the particularly engaging 10th grade American history teacher I had in 1998: lots of enthusiasm, lots of primary texts, a few personal anecdotes and musings thrown in for good measure. She focuses on one historical point in this book, telling us all about the first American Puritans and how they got this great experiment started. Winthrop, Williams, and Cotton are well-developed characters and Vowell […]