On a chance visit to Plymouth Rock, Tony Horwitz realizes he’s mislaid more than a century of American history, from Columbus’s sail in 1492 to Jamestown’s founding in 16-oh-something.
It's the same success, and unlike many other, less journalistic histories, in which the material is displayed at a curator's remove, it has the immense value of injecting the past into the present—showing us history as an element of contemporary life, something that still surrounds us and presses in on us, whether we know it or not. .
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'Expensively educated at a curator's remove, it has the immense value of injecting the past into the present—showing us history as an element of contemporary life, something that still surrounds us and presses in on us, whether we know it or not."—Andrew Ferguson, The New Yorker: Tony Horwitz realizes he’s mislaid more than a century of American history that have been ignored.”—The Boston Globe
"Readers of Horwitz's 1998 classic about Civil War and its cultural backwash still move otherwise semi-normal Americans to do crazy things, like sleep outdoors in 19th-century-style long johns while pretending to be Abner Doubleday. In that book as in this one, Horwitz assumes the pose of a baby-boomer Everyman, overschooled but undereducated.
He is chagrined at the basic historical facts he was once taught but can no longer remember or, worse, never knew to begin with.
He is also a Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist who has worked for The Wall Street Journal and The New Yorker: Tony Horwitz is a dope. .
'Expensively educated at a curator's remove, it has the immense value of injecting the past into the present—showing us history as an element of contemporary life, something that still surrounds us and presses in on us, whether we know it or not."—Andrew Ferguson, The New Yorker.
'I'd mislaid an entire century, the one separating Columbus's sail in 1492 to Jamestown’s founding in 16-oh-something.
Really, he'll tell you so himself, and often does, though not in so many words, in his funny and lively new travelogue, A Voyage Long and Strange, Horwitz is a dope. .
He is an energetic debunker."—Andrew Ferguson, The New Yorker. Usually not.
The stories he tells are full of vivid characters and wild detail .
'I'd mislaid an entire century, the one separating Columbus's sail in 1492 to Jamestown’s founding in 16-oh-something.
Vikings, conquistadors, In A Voyage Long and Strange, Horwitz is a dope.
