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.

The Grouchy Historian - Ed Asner

   2017; 262 pages.  Full Title : The Grouchy Historian: An Old-Time Lefty Defends Our Constitution Against Right-Wing Hypocrites and Nutjobs.  New Author? : Yes.  Genre : Politics, Commentary.  Overall Rating : 8*/10.

    Quick.  Tell me everything you know about the United States Constitution.

    Hmm.  Well, it was given by God Herself to our Founding Fathers.  It starts out “We, the People”.  No, wait; that was the Declaration of Independence.

    Not bad.  When was it written?

   A long time ago.  I think they wrote it the same time as they did the Declaration of Independence.  In fact, now that I think about it, I think the Declaration of Independence is the preamble to the Constitution.  Whatever a preamble is.

    What about the Amendments?

    I forgot about those.  Despite being an infallible document, God, in Her Graciousness, allowed us to make some changes to the Constitution.  The most important Amendment allowed us to get drunk again, after an earlier one said we couldn’t.  The other important one is the Second Amendment, which says everyone should carry an assault rifle with him at all times.

    You’re amazing.  One last question.  What about the Bill of Rights?

    Oh, I forgot about those too.  I’m pretty sure it was written at the same time as the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution.  It gives us the right to Life, Liberty, and the Happiness of Pursuit.  And a couple other things.  Including assault rifles.  And slaves.

    You are truly in a class by yourself when it comes to American History.  Can I interest you in Ed Asner’s new book, The Grouchy Historian?

What’s To Like...

    Ed Asner is an outspoken and unashamed voice for the Political Left, and The Grouchy Historian details his study and research into the history and content of the United States Constitution.  In fairness, he admits at the very beginning of the book that he is politically biased, and thus he is not presenting “both sides” of the debate.  Instead, he is an unabashed apologist for the Left, addressing and refuting the various skewed assertions proffered to us by the titular Right-Wing Hypocrites and Nutjobs.

    The book consists of 24 chapters covering 262 pages of text, plus another 73 pages of extras that includes notes, a bibliography, acknowledgements, and the full text of the Constitution itself and all the Amendments.  If you want to double-check anything that Ed Asner asserts, it is easy to do.

    The main topics are separated into seven sections, namely:

    1. The Constitutional Convention – Who was there and when they met.  (Chs. 2-3)

    2. God and the Constitution.  (Chs. 5-6)

    3. The Writing of the Constitution.  (Chs. 7-9)

    4. The Amendments: Ed’s Open Letters to prominent Right-Wing Nut-Jobs.  (Chs. 11-14)

    5. The Bill of Rights.  (Chs. 15-16)

    6. The Supreme Court Right-Wing Nut Jobs.  (Chs. 18-21)

    7. The Second Amendment: Guns and the NRA.  (Ch. 23)

    The other chapters are dribs and drabs of information that Ed Asner found intriguing, but which didn’t fit into any of those seven broader categories.  The book lists one Ed Weinberger as a co-author.  It is unclear what role he plays; I suspect he took the points Asner wanted to make and polished them into a readable form.

    I enjoyed the writing style – it’s a folksy, easy-to-read sort, that kept the contentious subject matter light and oftentimes amusing.  This also made the book a fast read, so if you need to do a book report for Civics class, and it’s due tomorrow, this may be your saving grace.

    The literary format is varied, which kept things from bogging down.  The writing of the Constitution is presented as a diary of one of James Madison’s slaves.  The Amendments section includes Ed presenting some of the right-wing proposals, balanced by some of his own.  The section about the American eugenics experiment (pg. 180) and the chapter about how often the Bill of Rights failed to protect citizens are both sobering and scary.

Excerpts...

    For the record: I do not pretend that what I say here is an objective study of the Constitution and the men and events that went into its creation.  I come to the subject as a citizen with my own strong point of view, believing that “objective historian” is a contradiction in terms, like “compassionate conservative” or “Fox News”.  (pg. 5)

    An early example of how natural law was used can be found in Bradwell v. Illinois (1873), a Supreme Court case in which Myra Bradwell had been denied admission to the Illinois State Bar because she was a woman.  The Supreme Court upheld the lower court’s ruling, its Chief Justice stating:

   “ …that God designed the sexes to occupy different spheres of action, and that it belonged to men to make, apply and execute the laws, was regarded as an almost axiomatic truth.”

    Which goes to show how stupid you can be when you’re sure you know what God is up to.  (pg. 212)

 “Scalia’s cultivated vision of the Constitution made him unquestionably one of the great minds of the thirteenth century.”  (pg. 208 )

    There are some quibbles.  First, while I enjoyed learning the author’s points-of-view, if you happen to be of the right-wing persuasion, you will probably hate those very things.  However, you can’t say Ed doesn’t warn you about this, and right at the very beginning.

    Similarly, he can get quite snarky at times, particularly when talking about the nut-jobs.   Since that’s the right-wingers’ favorite strategy when dealing with us liberals, there is a certain amount of karmic satisfaction here.  But it also feels a little like we’re mud-wrestling with pigs when we adopt their same dirty tactics.

    Finally, Chapter 8, wherein Ed gives short biographies of all 55 Framers of the Constitution, can get tedious and repetitive.  See the next paragraph for why.  Ed recognizes this, and gives the reader permission to skip this chapter if it bogs down.  I read the whole chapter anyway, but feel free to take him up on this offer after reading the first couple bios.  They don’t vary much from there on.

    8 Stars.  Highly informative and highly recommended.  If I had to sum up Ed Asner’s main hypothesis in The Grouchy Historian, it would be that those who wrote the Constitution did so to further their own fortunes (they were all rich white businessmen, whose fortunes depended heavily on speculating on frontier lands and near-worthless IOUs from the Revolutionary War).  And that the right-wingers who champion it today are doing the same.