![]() ![]() ![]() She has trained her eye not just on power but on “our favorite religion, capitalism, and our second-favorite religion, Christianity.” Following these threads takes her to the late 1700s and the exploration of Captain Cook and the first missionaries in the early 1800s. Vowell’s story begins 100 years before the “orgy of imperialism” in 1898, when America annexed Hawaii and invaded Cuba, Puerto Rico, the Philippines and Guam. ![]() Pride, irritation and a kind of slightly sour laugh that is a common result of high irony are frequent responses to her work.Īll of her books, and definitely this new one, can be summed up in the simple phrase: “Who the heck do we think we are?” “The Partly Cloudy Patriot” (how to be a good American, an interviewer at Salon wrote in 2002, “without being a terrible bore”), “Assassination Vacation” (in which Vowell takes the reader on a gruesome tour of the places where presidents Lincoln, Garfield and McKinley were shot), and “The Wordy Shipmates” (the story of the Massachusetts Bay Colony and how we have been haunted by the Puritans’ vision of themselves as God’s chosen people) chiseled a fault line through American exceptionalism. She is the queen of that great American institution: the road trip. She insists, like a good empiricist, on seeing the people and places she writes about. ![]() Her cleverness is gorgeously American: She collects facts and stores them like a nervous chipmunk, digesting them only for the sake of argument. Sarah Vowell is an intellectual melting pot. ![]()
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