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Mar
10
Sarah Vowell, UNFAMILIAR FISHES, and an “Orgy of Imperialism”
2011 at 5am Posted by Rebecca Joines Schinsky
Coming March 22, 2011 from Riverhead
I love me some Sarah Vowell. Whether she’s talking about Puritans and pilgrims, dead presidents, or her personal relationship with American history, Vowell’s take on the more obscure moments of America’s past is always interesting and informative, and it is usually hilarious to boot. The arrival of a new book from Sarah Vowell is cause for celebration Chez Book Lady, and I settled into Unfamiliar Fishes—about the “four-month orgy of imperialism” during which the U.S. invaded Cuba, Puerto Rico, the Phillippines, and Guam and annexed Hawaii in 1898—with glee and anticipation.
Vowell presents this four-month period as the moment when “the United States became a world power for the first time—became what it is now,” and she relates it to the more recent invasion of Iraq and overthrowing of Saddam Hussein in 2003, noting that while there are marked and significant differences between Hussein and Hawaii’s queen Liliuokalani, “there’s an identifiable link between the two overthrows, an American tendency to indulge in what trendy government lingo at the time was calling ‘regime change.’”
Unfamiliar Fishes is about “Hawaii’s bit part in the epic of American global domination,” but it is also about Vowell’s unique combination of political theory and social critique. Her readers know her opinions about 9/11, George W. Bush, and American conservatism, and she makes no effort to hide them. They are just as much a part of her books as nerdy jokes and affection for lesser known figures, and while they have the effect of narrowing her audience, I’m willing to bet they deepen it as well. Vowell does what she does, and she does it well, and her fans expect a certain level of well-informed snark to appear between her pages.
So when she says that America’s annexation of Hawaii involved “importing our favorite religion, capitalism, and our second-favorite religion, Christianity,” I am picking up what she’s throwing down. If an “Amen, Sister Vowell!” were appropriate, I’d shout it out, but I’m inclined to think Vowell prefers her religious declarations to be of the Jonathan Edwards-inspired spiders-dangling-over-the-flames-of-hell variety. Not that she’s down with being Puritanical, but she certainly gets the humor.
Vowell is at her best when she is putting a new spin on moments in history with which we’re all familiar but about which we’ve received a pre-packaged and often incorrect message. Unfamiliar Fishes is a slight departure from this tried and true formula, as most of what Vowell explores will be new information to a majority of readers, and the book suffers a bit for that. It is more difficult to take time to appreciate the jokes when you’re trying to keep a dozen hard-to-pronounce names (not to mention a long list of previously unheard of places) straight, and it occasionally seems that Vowell is stretching the material more than is necessary or advisable. The subject matter of Unfamiliar Fishes would make a fantastic long magazine article (or a series of them), but it doesn’t work as well in the long form as Vowell’s previous outings.
But Sarah Vowell is Sarah Vowell, and she is still, as always, worth the read and the reminder that our history books didn’t give us the whole story.
Check out Riverhead’s groovy book trailer:
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Oh, I love me some Sarah Vowell as well! The only way I’ve experienced her is via her amazing audios, narrated by her majesty in her squeaky little voice. Because her books are jammed packed FULL of a billion cool pieces of trivia, about 30% of it sticks to the wall, but I don’t really care. I pray my library picks this one up in audio!
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I have a Sarah Vowell book on my wishlist….it’s been there for forever. I think it’s time to just…buy it.
Excellent and interesting review!
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I have been excited about this book for a long while now
I must say one of my pet peeves is several hard to pronounce names. It’s probably part of the reason I hated Crime and Punishment. I really want to read something by Sarah Vowell but maybe I won’t start with this one.
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Start with The Wordy Shipmates. My favorite, by far.
I wonder if Sarah Vowell talks at all about how when the US takes over all these places, they took many of them from Spain (not Hawaii, but Puerto Rico, the Phillipines, and Cuba). What then happened is called The Generation of ’98. 1898, that is. In Spain this was an entire generation of authors that felt the repercussions of Spain’s sudden demise from world power to… not. It’s an interesting topic that we don’t really talk about in US schools, even though the Spanish empire was so intertwined with our own.
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She does mention the Spanish-American war, but the focus is definitely on the American part.
Ash — I’m with you on the hard-to-pronounce names, and it sounds like this book will have its share of them. Still, not enough to keep me from reading it. I just gloss over names when I read anyways.
The comparison between these two periods in US history (1898 and 2003-present) seems obvious to me now, though I’d never heard it made before. I’d be curious to see how she differentiates between them. It seems to me that the first period signaled America’s ascent to global power and the second triggered a mad scramble to remain in that position. Does she go into that at all?
I guess I’ll just have to read the book and find out.
Thanks for posting; really great review!
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Thanks for this great review. I can’t wait to pick this up, as I’m a huge Vowell fan–and I grew up in Hawai’i, so I imagine the difficulty with names, places, and history won’t be nearly as daunting: we learned all about Kamehameha, Ka’ahumanu, Kalakaua, and Ka’iulani alongside Washington, Jefferson, and all of those other guys.
[...] Rebecca at The Book Lady’s Blog [...]