The Partly Cloudy Patriot - Sarah Vowell

   2002; 200 pages.  New Author? : No.  Genres : Essays; Politics & Government; US History; Anecdotes.  Overall Rating : 8*/10.

    Sarah Vowell wrote three fantastic History books between 2008 and 2015, all of which I’ve read and reviewed.  The Wordy Shipmates chronicles the Puritan colonists; Unfamiliar Fishes tells how the United States came about acquiring the Hawaiian Islands; and Lafayette in the Somewhat United States which focuses on that the famous French general who helped our cause in the Revolutionary War.

    I enjoyed them all, giving each on a rating in the 8-9 Stars range, and since then I’ve been looking forward eagerly to whatever historical subject she next researches and writes about.  Alas, five years later, I’m still waiting.  If she’s put written any books since then, neither Wikipedia nor Amazon are aware of it.

    Fortunately, there are four Sarah Vowell books from the 1997-2005 timespan, in which, I gather, she writes about a variety of topics instead of focusing on just one.  I’ve got three of those books on either my Kindle or my TBR shelf.  And since it’s been five years since I last read anything by her, I felt it was time to pull one of them off the shelf and get cracking.

    I chose the one with the enigmatic title The Partly Cloudy Patriot.

What’s To Like...

    The Partly Cloudy Patriot is a collection of nineteen articles from Sarah Vowell, about evenly split between ones that were previously published and ones  that were new.  Their length varies from 4 to 32 pages, which means some can technically be called essays and others called anecdotes.

    The articles cover a broad spectrum of genres, including historical (the Salem witch trials); politics (presidential libraries); athletics (arcade basketball, aka “Pop-a-Shot”); art (German cinema); Hollywood (thoughts about Tom Cruise); travel (there’s a restaurant in the Carlsbad Caverns); bloopers (maps that show California as an island), and family (Sarah Vowell is a twin!).

    My two favorite chapters were Rosa Parks, C’est Moi, which cites various people who have dared to compare themselves to Rosa Parks, and the titular The Partly Cloudy Patriot, which examines the not-so-patriotic ways some people define “patriotism”.  My two favorite chapter titles were God Will Give You Blood to Drink in a Souvenir Shot Glass and Tom Landry, Existentialist, Dead at 75.  I’ll let you guess what those two chapters are about.

    It was fun to get to know the author a bit.  As mentioned, Sarah is a twin (fraternal, not identical), is an atheist who was raised a Pentecostal, has endured family Thanksgivings (haven’t we all?), and worked as a teenager in a map-dealer’s store.  She’s also a diehard Dallas Cowboy fan, but hey, nobody's perfect.

    Being a Pennsylvanian by birth, I enjoyed her walk through the Gettysburg battlefield, and chuckled at the brief mention of the unique town of Hershey.  I liked the literary nods to The Great Gatsby and The Cross and the Switchblade.  I read the latter at some point in my junior high years.   Luther and Johnny Htoo were new to me, as was the chocolatey caffé mocha from Starbucks, and the Tom Landry Christian comic book left me scratching my head.

    Sarah Vowell’s wit abounds throughout, which made this a fun read from beginning to end.  And while my favorite books by her will continue to be those that focus on a single historical subject, The Partly Cloudy Patriot serves as an excellent stopgap until she gets back to writing full-length books again.

Excerpts...

    I wish that in order to secure his party’s nomination, a presidential candidate would be required to point at the sky and name all the stars; have the periodic table of the elements memorized; rattle off the kings and queens of Spain; joke around in Latin; interpret the symbolism of seventeenth-century Dutch painting; explain photosynthesis to a six-year-old; recite Emily Dickinson; bake a perfect popover; build a shortwave radio out of a coconut; and know all the words to Hoagy Carmichael’s “Two Sleepy People”, Johnny Cash’s “Five Feet High and Rising”, and “You Got the Silver” by the Rolling Stones.  (loc. 1308)

    In 1873, Canada’s first prime minister, John MacDonald, saw what was happening in the American Wild West and organized a police force to make sure Canada steered clear of America’s bloodbath.

    That’s it.  Or, as they might say in Quebec, voilà!  That explains how the Canadians are different from Americans.  No cowboys for Canada.  Canada got Mounties instead – Dudley Do-Right, not John Wayne.  (loc. 1599)

American history is a quagmire, and the more one knows, the quaggier the mire gets.  (loc. 1676 )

    I've yet to find much to gripe about in any Sarah Vowell book, and that’s true for The Partly Cloudy Patriot as well.  I think I counted eleven cusswords in the whole book, mostly where she’s quoting someone.  There are some interesting pictures, although not every chapter has one.  And if your political viewpoint is staunch right-wing, you probably should give this book a pass.

    The Partly Cloudy Patriot was a quick and easy read, so if you have a book report due in two days in your high school Civics class and you haven’t even started reading anything yet, this may be your saving grace.

    8 Stars.  Take the Cannoli and Assassination Vacation remain in my library.  Hopefully it won’t take another five years to read one or both of them.