All posts tagged "Sarah Vowell"

I finished Sarah Vowell's new book The Wordy Shipmates nearly a week ago, but I haven't gotten around to reviewing it, due to the craziness of the past week. The topic seems sort of weird at first blush---it's a history of the Puritans that first settled the Massachusetts Bay Colony, but Vowell makes her case for why it's relevant upfront. Vowell argues that the American heritage from our Puritans is not necessarily our work ethic or sexual repression (in fact, she argues that the Puritan obsession with sex is something later people read into their culture---not that they weren't patriarchal and repressed, but that they didn't have the same obsession with it that our current fundies do), but that it's the belief in inherent moral superiority, that we are god's new chosen people. Her explanation of how the Puritans differ from today's fundies alone makes the book worth reading, and will make you like the Puritans more, because for all that they were practically medieval, at least they strove to be better people, whereas today's fundies wallow in the art of backsliding anti-intellectualism.

I'll admit; I was glad for the Texas Book Festival this weekend because it kept me off the computer for hours at a time. And I've been buried in Sarah Vowell's new book, which I'll finish in what seems record time. I try to read political news and keep up with changes in the campaigns, but inevitably I end up looking at polling data, and using Yahoo's "create your own scenario" map to convince myself that we're very close to losing this, because it's just too easy to see all the major swing states go for McCain. It seems possible that Obama could get 55% of the vote and still lose, and the idea makes my stomach churn.