When I grow up...
Jul. 5th, 2009 12:38 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
osprey_archerOne of my many aspirations in life is to be as awesome as Sarah Vowell.
Why? Well, we will start with this op-ep piece about the Rhode Island Legislature's recent attempt to whittle the "and Providence Plantations" right off the official state name. It's hard to beat a sentence like "On the one hand, as a person who spends a minimum of 20 minutes a week furious with President William McKinley, I feel that these, the historically minded, bleeding-heart hand-wringers leading this movement, are my people."
But even without that sentence, it's an op-ed full of amusing historical goodness, and an impassioned editorial about why Providence Plantations is an integral part of Rhode Island's name and must remain. Impassioned, about something that seems so small and esoteric and remotely historical. The world needs more passion.
But if a mere article isn't enough to explain my aspiration, Vowell also wrote a book called Assassination Vacation, which is about the assassinations of Lincoln and Garfield and McKinley. It's possibly the funniest book I've read all year (sometimes morbidly, though not macabrely; she once refers to Robert Todd Lincoln as "Jinxy McDeath") - and also one of the most compassionate.
This compassion is Vowell's great strength. She tries, and I think succeeds admirably, to understand the historical figures she's discussing: she sifts through the Garfield's bland mediocrity to highlight his love of books, she searches through the historical evidence on Samuel Mudd (the doctor who set John Wilkes Booth's leg after he shot Abraham Lincoln) and finds him a raging racist who probably conspired with the Confederacy if not with Booth, and also a good doctor.
I admire the willingness to show both facets of his personality and not to try to make one overshadow the other: the gentle insistence on complexity and truth, and the refusal - not the refusal to judge; but the refusal to condemn.
I think it's a wonderful book, and I would recommend it to anyone; especially anyone with an interest in history, in travelogue, or in how to write compelling and multifaceted people.
Why? Well, we will start with this op-ep piece about the Rhode Island Legislature's recent attempt to whittle the "and Providence Plantations" right off the official state name. It's hard to beat a sentence like "On the one hand, as a person who spends a minimum of 20 minutes a week furious with President William McKinley, I feel that these, the historically minded, bleeding-heart hand-wringers leading this movement, are my people."
But even without that sentence, it's an op-ed full of amusing historical goodness, and an impassioned editorial about why Providence Plantations is an integral part of Rhode Island's name and must remain. Impassioned, about something that seems so small and esoteric and remotely historical. The world needs more passion.
But if a mere article isn't enough to explain my aspiration, Vowell also wrote a book called Assassination Vacation, which is about the assassinations of Lincoln and Garfield and McKinley. It's possibly the funniest book I've read all year (sometimes morbidly, though not macabrely; she once refers to Robert Todd Lincoln as "Jinxy McDeath") - and also one of the most compassionate.
This compassion is Vowell's great strength. She tries, and I think succeeds admirably, to understand the historical figures she's discussing: she sifts through the Garfield's bland mediocrity to highlight his love of books, she searches through the historical evidence on Samuel Mudd (the doctor who set John Wilkes Booth's leg after he shot Abraham Lincoln) and finds him a raging racist who probably conspired with the Confederacy if not with Booth, and also a good doctor.
I admire the willingness to show both facets of his personality and not to try to make one overshadow the other: the gentle insistence on complexity and truth, and the refusal - not the refusal to judge; but the refusal to condemn.
I think it's a wonderful book, and I would recommend it to anyone; especially anyone with an interest in history, in travelogue, or in how to write compelling and multifaceted people.
