A Voyage Long And Strange: Rediscovering the New World
Tony Horwitz, . . Holt, $27.50 (445pp) ISBN 978-0-8050-7603-5
As opposed to the Pilgrims, Tony Horwitz begins his journey at Plymouth Rock.
Plymouth Rock is a myth. The Pilgrims—who, Horwitz notes, were on a mission that was based less on freedom and the schoolbook history ideas the president of the United States typically mentions when he pardons a turkey at the White House and more on finding a cure for syphilis—may or may not have noticed it. In about 1741, a church elder in Plymouth, winging it, pointed out a boulder that is now more like a not-at-all-precious stone. Three hundred years later, people push and shove to see it in summer tourist season, wearing T-shirts that say, “America’s Hometown.” Which eventually leads an overstimulated (historically speaking) Horwitz to come close to starting a fight in a Plymouth bar. “Not to Virginians it isn’t,” he writes. “Or Hispanics or Indians.”
“Forget all the others,” his bar mate says loudly. “
Horwitz can occasionally be smug about what constitutes custom—who’s to say that a Canadian tribe’s regular karaoke night isn’t a community-building exercise as valid as the communal sweat that nearly kills Horwitz early on in his thousands of miles of adventures? But as a character himself, he is friendly and always working hard to listen and bear witness. “I hate the whole Thanksgiving story,” says a newspaper editor of Spanish descent, a man he meets along the trail of Coronado. “We should be eating chili, not turkey. But no one wants to recognize the Spanish because it would mean admitting that they got here decades before the English.”
Reviewed on: 03/10/2008
Genre: Nonfiction
Hardcover - 445 pages - 978-0-7195-6637-0
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