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"  In her latest dispatches on popular history, The Wordy Shipmates (Riverhead), Sarah Vowell, best-selling author (Assassination Vacation, The Partly Cloudy Patriot) and contributor to public radio&amp;#039;s This American Life, examines\u2014and somehow channels for us, to our lasting amusement\u2014her favorite Massachusetts Bay colony Puritans: Johns Winthrop and Cotton and exiles Roger Williams and Anne Hutchinson. Though much of the narrative line is lifted from Winthrop&amp;#039;s writings (and is at times overly detailed if your ardor for the visionary diarist doesn&amp;#039;t match Vowell&amp;#039;s), her entertaining gloss on the 1620 settlers&amp;#039; struggle between humility before God and the egomania that comes with being God&amp;#039;s chosen is leavened by her modern-day tours of the Mohegan Sun casino and a Mayflower-themed waterslide. For those of us who&amp;#039;d rather harvest our history lessons from The Simpsons than the History Channel, Vowell is a latter-day hero.  What&amp;#039;s most fascinating here is watching how America&amp;#039;s first settlers\u2014upon arriving more than 100 years before the American Revolutionary generation was born\u2014began to embrace democratic ideas even as they clung to faith in predestination and providence, most famously Winthrop in his &amp;quot;city on a hill&amp;quot; speech, which was invoked a few times by Catholic (gasp!) JFK and then by Ronald Reagan almost ad nauseam. Fast-forward to 2008, and Vowell handily helps us identify with the essential question that propelled the colonists all the way to the New World: What if our country is destroying itself? "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
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