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.

Lafayette in the Somewhat United States - Sarah Vowell

   2015; 275 pages.  New Author? : No.  Genre : History; Non-Fiction.  Overall Rating : 9*/10.

    Quick! How many battles in the American Revolutionary War can you name?  Well, let’s see now.  Lexington, Concord, Bunker Hill, and Yorktown.  That’s about it.

    Not bad, now how many generals from that war can you name?  Well there’s Washington.  Hmm.  And Cornwallis.  Oh, and that French guy, Lafayette.

    And what did Lafayette do in the war?  Umm.  I don’t know.  Brought us the Statue of Liberty perhaps?  You know, maybe I should read a book about it.

What’s To Like...

    Lafayette in the Somewhat United States is Sarah Vowell’s wonderful book about a subject we Americans ought to, and usually don’t, know much about – our war of Independence.  It is aptly titled,  since Vowell focuses on both the conflict itself, and one of the most fascinating characters associated with it.

    The first part of the book deals with events leading up to the war, which was something that almost nobody wanted – not England, not France, and not most of the colonists.  Wars are expensive, something none of the European powers could afford.  The French were unsure of the Americans’ resolve.  The English felt it was highly unlikely that they could win a war fought so far from their homeland.  And the colonies were reluctant to supply the massive amounts of supplies – food, clothing, blankets, weapons and ammo, boots, etc. – to equip the ragtag army that spent mosto of their time running away from the Redcoats, rather than fighting them.

    Vowell blends all this in with the early biography of Lafayette, including trivia such as the fact that his dad was killed by a British cannonball, and his mother died when he was 12, leaving him young, but very, very rich.

    The historical aspects are presented objectively.  Washington’s blunders – and there are quite a few – are not covered up.  Neither are the arrogance and complacency of the British.  And both sides were hampered significantly by internal politicking and petty jealousies.  But through it all, Lafayette’s optimism, idealism, and loyalty to the cause shines like a beacon in the gloom.

    If you’ve read any other Sarah Vowell books, you know she has a penchant for tying historical events to present-day issues, and that’s true here as well.  The USA may be a divided country right now, with the Republican hardliners trying to shut the government down.  But Vowell’s point is that we’ve always been like this.

    There are no chapters in the book, which I found odd.  But there are a bunch of caricatures dispersed throughout the book to break the tedium, the last one of which will make you gasp.  And the author gets a tip-of-the-hat for name-dropping one of her friends, Wesley Stace, who will be more familiar to some of us by his stage nane: John Wesley Harding.

Kewlest New Word…

Annus Mirabilis  (n.; phrase)  :  a remarkable or auspicious year.

Others : Frenemies

Excerpts...

    The newly dubbed General Lafayette was only nineteen years old.  Considering Independence Hall was also where the founders calculated that a slave equals three-fifths of a person and cooked up an electoral college that lets Florida and Ohio pick our presidents, making an adolescent who barely spoke English a major general at the age I got hired to run the cash register at a Portland pizza joint was not the worst decision ever made there.

    On the one hand, the French rookie got himself shot in the calf in his very first battle.  On the other hand, he was so gung ho that he cut short his recuperation and returned to duty with one leg in a boot and the other wrapped in a blanket.  (loc. 58)

    The reason the American commander was waiting around to react was that, in 1777, Washington’s plan to outsmart and outlive the enemy was to try not to die.  This was the so-called Fabian strategy, named for the Roman general Fabius Maximus, the Cunctator (“the delayer”), who spent years wearing down the deadlier Carthagenians by retreating every time his opponents seemed poised to prevail, thus holding the Roman army together; basically, Fabius annoyed his enemies to death.  (loc. 1052)

Kindle Details...

    Lafayette in the Somewhat United States sells for $13.99 at Amazon, which makes it the most expensive Sarah Vowell e-book out there.  Her other 6 books there are all in the $7.99-$12.99 range.

 You know your country has a checkered past when you find yourself sitting around pondering the humanitarian upside of sticking with the British Empire.  (loc. 2033)

    The quibbles are minor.  There are a host of French functionaries to meet and greet.  I didn’t bother to jot their names and roles down, and it eventually got confusing trying to recall who did what, and how they viewed the American upstarts.  A glossary might have been nice.  Then again, I could’ve taken better notes.

    The book ends at the logical point – Cornwallis’s surrender at Yorktown.  But there was still a formidable British army en route by sea from New York in a belated attempt to save Cornwallis.  I never did figure out why they didn’t attempt to rescue their captured brethren.

    But I pick at nits.  Lafayette in the Somewhat United States was a fantastic read – from the lesser-known battles (such as Brandywine), to the miserable wintry conditions at Valley Forge, to lots of ink devoted to one of my personal Revolutionary War heroes, Nathanael Greene.  And I’m crazy about John Wesley Harding’s music. 

    9 Stars.  Highly recommended to lovers of History.  Subtract 1 star if you’re a teabagger; you’re not going to enjoy Ms. Vowell’s asides.  Better stick to Glenn Beck’s and Bill O’Really’s faux history.

Unfamiliar Fishes - Sarah Vowell

    2011; 238 pages.  New Author? : No.  Genre : Non-Fiction; History.  Overall Rating : 8*/10.

    Hawaii.  How the heck did it end up a US possession?  We weren’t the first Western nation to land there.  The British were.  We weren’t even the second; that was the French.  We didn’t buy it, like we did Alaska.  We didn’t even start a war to grab it from a weaker nation, like we did for the Philippines.

    But God will make a way.  It's our manifest destiny.  Send in the missionaries.

What’s To Like...

    Unfamiliar Fishes is not a complete history of Hawaii; instead it focuses on the years from 1820, when the first white people went there to settle, to 1898, when the US formally annexed it.  Those 1820 settlers were in fact missionaries, and they would have a profound and lasting impact on the history of the Hawaiian Islands.

    Sarah Vowell did extensive research for the book, including reading a number of journals kept by those first-generation missionaries.  The history is told from the native Hawaiians’ POV, which is to be expected.  But the author balances the positives and negatives of both sides.  The natives got shafted, but their rulers, had only recently consolidated their power, were corrupt, and invited the missionaries to land and dwell on their isles.

    Sarah Vowell employs her trademark style here; this is not a dry, boring history tome.  You will learn the meaning of lots of Hawaiian words and phrases – haole, wahine maka, palapala, mikanele (a corruption of ‘missionary’), and my personal favorite “Big Kahuna”.

    You will also become familiar with 19^th-century Hawaiian culture, and will learn some neat trivia to boot.  The only palace on US soil is located here, and the first newspaper to be printed west of the Rockies started in Hawaii.  There are numerous Vowell personal “asides”, which can get distracting at times.  But she closes the book with a tribute to Bruddah Iz, so all is forgiven.  

Excerpts...

    Why is there a glop of macaroni salad next to the Japanese chicken in my plate lunch?  Because the ship Thaddeus left Boston Harbor with the first boatload of New England missionaries bound  for Hawaii in 1819.  That and it’s Saturday.  Rainbow Drive-In only serves shoyu chicken four days a week.

    A banyan tree in Waikiki is a fine spot for a sunburned tourist from New York City to sit beneath and ponder the historical implications of a lukewarm box of takeout.  Because none of us belong here – not me, not the macaroni, not the chicken soaked in soy sauce, not even the tree.”  (loc. 46, and the opening paragraphs of the book.)

    Queen Liliuokalani, now released from her palace prison, traveled to the United States to lobby against annexation once again.  On a train from California heading east, she marveled, “Here were thousands of acres of uncultivated, uninhabited, but rich and fertile lands... Colonies and colonies could be established here... And yet this great and powerful nation must go across two thousand miles of sea, and take from the poor Hawaiians their little spots in the broad Pacific.”  She had a point, but it doesn’t take a graduate of the Naval War College to notice you can’t exactly park a battleship in Denver.  (loc. 2710)

Kindle Details...

    Unfamiliar Fishes sells for $10.99 at Amazon.  Sarah Vowell has five other books available for the Kindle, ranging in price from $7.59 to $10.99.  In most cases, the paperback format is $2-$3 more than the Kindle, but since you can resell a “real” book you’ve read to a used bookstore, it might make more economic sense to go with the paperback.  Or check with your local library, since I borrowed  Unfamiliar Fishes through mine for free.

”You don’t earn the nickname “Merrie Monarch” by sticking to a budget.”  (loc. 2345)

    Here’s the formula used to subjugate Hawaii,

   

    First send in the missionaries with their Bibles, English language (the Hawaiians had no writing system), printing presses, and Western culture.  Next send in the sailors with their various killing diseases - influenza, smallpox, and measles - to decimate the population.

    Get the natives hooked on money (buying and selling were new concepts to them).  Now that they understand material wealth, have them  start growing acres and acres of sugar cane, and market it to the United States.  But cultivating sugar cane is labor-intensive, so bring in lots of foreigners, mostly from Asia.  Before you know it, the native Hawaiians are a minority, and there goes their power.

    Send in American “advisors” to sway the Royals into making new self-crippling laws.  And finally, send in the troops and stage a coup.  Voila!  It worked like a charm.

    I found Unfamiliar Fishes to be an interesting read, with only a couple of small patches where the asides became tedious.  Sarah Vowell is a gifted writer, being able to make learning History a fun experience.

    8 Stars.  Not quite as good as Vowell’s The Wordy Shipmates (reviewed here), but perhaps there was less subject matter to work with here.  Highly recommended.  Subtract 2 stars if you think it is America’s duty to foist our culture on the whole world.  Subtract another 2 stars if you happen to be a missionary.

The Wordy Shipmates - Sarah Vowell

2008; 248 pages. New Author?: Yes. Genre : Non-Fiction; American History. Overall Rating : 8½*/10.

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Why do (some) Americans believe that the USA has been chosen by God to be a shining example of goodness and freedom for the rest of the world, even if we have to invade, subjugate, and occupy them to make them see the light? In The Wordy Shipmates, Sarah Vowell makes the case that it goes all the way back to the Puritans of 1630.

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This book takes an in-depth look at those Puritans (not the same as the Pilgrims) who founded (what was to become) Boston in 1630 - their leaving friends and family behind in troubled England; their struggle for survival in those first couple years; the theological divisions that quickly arose; Roger Williams and his benevolent banishment; the annihilation on the Pequot Indians (it was God's will); and the vexing Anne Hutchinson, who touched off controversy about immigration control, being born again, and women's rights and roles.

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What's To Like...

A variety of characters are put under the microscope - the aforementioned Mr. Williams and Mrs. Hutchinson; the compassionate control-freak, Governor John Winthrop; the theocratic Rev. John Cotton; the pragmatic native survivalist, Uncas; and even the modern-day lightning-rod, Ronald Reagan. To Ms. Vowell's credit, none of these are presented as all-good or all-evil.

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You get in-depth insight into the mind-set of the Puritans. They are not simpletons, despite seeing messages from God in every event. They struggle to justify their theological idealism with everyday realities; and worry constantly whether they'll make it to Heaven.

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But what really stands out is Vowell's writing style. This is not the arid history your high school teacher used to force-feed you. She repeatedly ties it in to present-day Americana - things like the TV shows The Brady Bunch and Happy Days; Ronald Reagan and JFK; 9/11 and Bruce Springsteen; and elementary school Pilgrim pageants and Pentecostal three-times-a-week services.

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Kewl New Words...

Cathartic : tension-releasing. Wainscot : a panel forming the lower part of an interior wall, finished differently from the rest of the wall. Sachem : a chief of an Algonquin tribe.

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Excerpts...

The Old Testament Israelites are to the Puritans what the blues was to the Rolling Stones - a source of inspiration, a renewable resource of rifts. What Cotton is telling them is that, like the Old Testament Jews, God has given them a new home, a promised land. And, like the Old Testament Jews, God has printed eviction notices for them to tack up on the homes of the nothing-special, just-folks folks who are squatting there. (pg. 2)

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In 1630, however, the truth that all men are created equal is far from self-evident. Winthrop is saying the opposite - that God created all men unequal. To Winthrop, this is a good thing, especially since he's in charge. ... To a modern reader, this social theory smacks of "I need you to mow my lawn and you need me not to report you to immigration." (pg. 37-38)

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"We must not look only on our own things, but also on the things of our brethren." (pg. 56. a sentence that can have two interpretations - Christian compssion or Orwellian monitoring)

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Roger Williams is God's own goalie - no seemingly harmless pleasantry gets past him. To Williams, "Christendom", that affable word describing Europe and its colonies, is an affront to Christ. For this, he blames Constantine the Great.

Is he referring to Constantine, the first Roman Emperor to legalize Christianity in the year 313, thereby allowing Christians to worship in peace after centuries in the Coliseum as lion food? Yep, that's the jerk. (pg. 113)

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Is it streets of gold for me or am I merely lighter fluid for the flames of hell? (pg. 42)

If you aren't thrilled by history, The Wordy Shipmates might not be for you, as there is very little violence and bloodshed until about 200 pages in. Ditto for dittoheads. For everyone else, this comes with my high recommendation.

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Since my knowledge of the Puritans is sketchy at best (they were different from the Pilgrims somehow; they fled religious persecution in England to practice it here; later on they burned witches), this was an enlightening read. If you only read one non-fiction book per year (that's me!), this is an excellent choice. 8½ stars.

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Other voices...

Many thanks to Coach for turning me on to this book. You can read his review of The Wordy Shipmates here.