Hello, I’m Charles Jones, retired Director of the KU Public Management Center and author of the 2022 Kansas novel The Illusion of Simple. I welcome this opportunity to discuss Sara Vowell’s The Wordy Shipmates as part of High Plains 2025 Radio Reader’s Book Club.
Sarah Vowell is a fifty-five year old Oklahoman, now New Yorker, who is small, pale, and favors black attire in a kind of Wednesday Addams cool. Her soft voice is girlishly high-pitched, so cartoonish that she provided the daughter’s voice in the successful animated film, The Incredibles. She is also keenly intelligent, endlessly curious, and possessed of a delightful sense of humor and literary grace. A true believer in American exceptionalism, she finds patriotic purpose in reminding her readers of both the best and worst in our national story.
In the Wordy Shipmates, Vowell turns her attention to the 1630 New World arrival of the Massachusetts Bay Colony, founders of what would become Boston.
Leading this courageous voyage from England is the attorney and inspiring Puritan leader John Winthrop. It was Winthrop who first coined the term “city on a hill,” a statement of religious providence intended to spark confidence and stamina among his followers as they braved starvation, frightful cold, disease, and other dangers.
Regrettably, real life has a way of undermining even the most noble aspirations. In contrast to Winthrop’s elevated rhetoric, the Massachusetts state motto came to express a more pragmatic reality, a harsher worldview: “By the sword we seek peace, but peace only under liberty.”
As it would turn out, peace was an inconstant companion during the colony’s difficult first decade. Relationships between the Pilgrims and indiginous tribes they encountered fluctuated between collaboration and flashes of terrible, and often disproportionate violence.
As for liberty, freedom of speech was often dependent upon exactly what was said, and by whom.
It was Winthrop’s mission to extend the Anglican church to the new continent, introducing Christianity to pagan people who obviously could use a little spiritual coaching. His equally devout founder and lifelong frenemy, Roger Williams, accepted Jesus into his heart but felt the Church’s oppressive hierarchy posed obstacles to the individual’s relationship with God. Their disagreement became so toxic that Winthrop and his allies banished Williams into the wilderness. So much for liberty. Eventually Williams founded the state of Rhode Island, a welcoming and tolerant settlement whose State motto consists of the single heartfelt and inclusive word: Hope.
Walking us in painstaking detail through these early chapters of the American story, Sarah Vowell is a strong and charming presence. Her alternately sweet and sardonic narrative tells us who, among the Founders, she likes and dislikes and which events she cheers and abhors. Most importantly, Vowell explores how so many of those early Pilgrim seeds took root and grew into our national character.
The Wordy Shipmates is a compelling read in that its subject matter is too serious to be taken as strictly as humor…but it’s too funny and charming and moving to be dismissed as dry scholarship. This is the fourth or fifth of Sarah’s books that I have read. She never fails to provoke thought, her writing never fails to be accessible and endearing.
I count Sarah Vowell as one of the best friends I’ve never met. Read her once and you will, too.

Charles Forrest Jones lives with his wife and dogs in Lawrence, Kansas and Creede, Colorado. He has a BS in Biology from Kansas University, an MPA from Harvard University’s Kennedy School, and spent the majority of his professional life in public service. From 2003 to 2014, he served as Director of the Kansas University Public Management Center and taught MPA ethics and administration. Each of his academic courses included at least one reading to inspire creativity -- such as The Glass Castle or On Writing -- for public policy is rooted in the human condition. There is a place for the articulate, compelling, even beautiful.