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Harvard Book Store is delighted to welcome best-selling author and NPR contributor SARAH VOWELL for a discussion of her latest work, an examination of the Puritans entitled The Wordy Shipmates! New York Times-bestselling author of Assassination Vacation and The Partly Cloudy Patriot turns a discerning eye on the Puritans, their covenant communities, their deep-rooted idealism, their political and cultural relevance in today's world, and their myriad oddities. In The Wordy Shipmates, Vowell travels once again through America's past, this time to seventeenth-century New England. From the British Library to the Mohegan Sun casino, from the nation's first synagogue to a Mayflower waterslide, Vowell studies the Puritan effect and finds their beliefs about church and state more interesting than their buckles-and-corn reputation would suggest. "NPR contributor Vowell takes a hard but affectionate look at the legacy of those doughty, slightly deranged Puritans who landed in the New World in 1630. Fans will be pleased to see that Vowell's admittedly smart-alecky style is alive and well: It's not every historical monograph that tosses together Anne Hutchinson and Nancy Drew, Dolly Parton and John Endecott. The author's characteristic devotion to detail is also evident.... "Vowell examines what she sees as the cascading effects of the Puritans' arrival, drawing a straight line from Massachusetts Bay to Abu Ghraib. She continually bashes the current President Bush, points out the tarnish that others seem to ignore on the well-burnished image of President Reagan (who patently lied about Iran-Contra) and ends with a paean to JFK." -Kirkus Reviews
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