Vowell's leading man is the colony's first governor, John Winthrop, whose persona is as divided as Dr.
Vowell delivers a vivid sense of the punishing ocean voyage and brutal conditions in the colony, as well as the way the Puritans are bedeviled by physical threats without (native tribes) and spiritual threats within (theological rebels Roger Williams, dubbed by Vowell "God's goalie," and Anne Hutchinson, "the Puritan Oprah – a leader, a guru, a star"). In The Wordy Shipmates, Vowell revisits the first decade of the Massachusetts Bay Colony, where a crew of nonseparatist Puritans who have left Mother England (without letting go of her apron strings) are striving to build a commonwealth of Christian ideals. Leave it to this self-proclaimed history nerd – she who turned the macabre topic of presidential murders into a comic travelog with a brainy kick – to redeem the Puritans from their stereotype of starchy piety and reveal them for the people they truly were: literary, thoughtful, courageous, and beset internally by an almost Shakespearean conflict between freedom and fidelity to spiritual doctrine. That may change with Sarah Vowell handling their PR. We regard those faith-based early colonists as being so dour, so prudish, as such a kaffeeklatsch of killjoys, that who could possibly get pumped up over a tome about them except for, well, other Puritans?
Quick show of hands: Who's all hot to read a new book about the Puritans?
0 kommentar(er)
