The Wordy Shipmates
by Sarah Vowel
Grade B
This is a nice and funny look at America’s first Puritans. The book nicely links the beliefs of those early years of the nation’s founding to the country’s later history. Well done. It has some serious flaws though. There are no chapters, which seems because the book has no organization. It jumps around here and there and seems to move through the first few years of the founding of the Massachusetts Bay Colony. But it jumps around so much there’s no sense of progress. Vowel attempts to overcome this by being funny and witty. It doesn’t completely work. Because of that there is little clear thesis. Still, I finished it in a couple nights’ reading, and it was worth the time.
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