“The only thing more dangerous than an idea is a belief. And by dangerous I dont mean thought-provoking. I mean: might get people killed.” ― Sarah Vowell, The Wordy Shipmates I am listening to this book read by the author and man is it good. You end up sort of begrudgingly liking the Puritans, a word she spends most of the book trying to reclaim from popular parlance and define more precisely and fully. Its sort of a story of an America that might have been, that might be yet, one of community and shared sacrifice. She points out that those who landed at Plymouth Rock and those who landed ten years later at what would become Boston were not nearly as boring as we think of them and were extremely avid readers and writers (hence the title). The anti intellectualism of todays fundamentalist tea people she traces back not to the Puritans of the 17th century but the revival movement a few hundred years later. These people founded Harvard for gods sake and were instrumental in ending slavery, often through the spoken or written word. The one stereotype of Puritans that does ring true is the sense of exceptionalism, the dangerously imbalanced belief that we are a chosen people so loved by god that he sent a plague to kill over nine of ten Native Americans before the pilgrims landed. She traces this city upon a hill narcissism through current foreign policy (the book was published five years after the American invasion of Iraq). We somehow got this idea that god loves us more than anyone else while losing any humility about having to do anything in particular to remain worthy (which would have gone along with the Calvinist idea of predestination). Anyway, very good book.
Posted on: Tue, 23 Sep 2014 01:12:24 +0000
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