Review by New York Times Review
NEVER mind his Pulitzer, the bestselling books, the writing jobs at The Wall Street Journal and The New Yorker: Tony Horwitz is a dope. 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 probably best known as the author of "Confederates in the Attic," an exploration of how the American 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. Like so many of us, he is the incarnation of Father Guido Sarducci's Five Minute University, where degrees are awarded for reciting the two or three things the average liberal-arts graduate remembers from four years of college. In "A Voyage Long and Strange," Horwitz is surprised to learn how little he knows about the Europeans who "discovered" America. (One thing he does remember from college is to wrap those scare-quote marks around politically contentious words like "discover.") His astonishing ignorance dawned on him during a visit to Plymouth Rock. "I'd mislaid an entire century, the one separating Columbus's sail in 1492 from Jamestown's founding in 16-0-something," he writes. "Expensively educated at a private school and university - a history major, no less! - I'd matriculated to middle age with a third grader's grasp of early America." Horwitz resolves to remedy his ignorance by embarking on an intensive self-tutorial mixed with lots of reporting and running around. He looks for Columbus's remains in the Dominican Republic; tracks Coronado through Mexico, Texas and even Kansas; sifts evidence of the Vikings' landing in Newfoundland; and gives the Anglos their due in tidewater Virginia. The result is popular history of the most accessible sort. The pace never flags, even for easily distracted readers, because Horwitz knows how to quick-cut between historical narrative and a breezy account of his own travels. It's the same method he used in "Confederates," deployed with 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. Usually not. Go forth and conquer: The frontispiece to a 16th-century manual for Spanish explorers. The stories he tells are full of vivid characters and wild detail. Among Newfoundland's Micmac Indians, for example, Horwitz endures a horrifying session in one of their fabled sweat lodges, where, it turns out, sweating is just for openers: "Finally, I stopped struggling and gave in to the torment, entering a trancelike state, less from heightened consciousness than from impaired body function. What spirit I had wasn't raised; it was crushed." Among Dominicans, he learns that Spain is hated with an intensity usually reserved for the United States. The hatred is rooted in Spain's ancient crimes against natives, Horwitz says, but you can also detect the inverted scorn - part envy, part outrage, part sorrow - that the conquered have always felt for their conquerors. Indeed, contempt for the explorers, whether Spanish or English, is now the common default position, not only among the descendants of the Indians they brutally conquered, but also among most of the park rangers, academics and political activists Horwitz encounters. Mostly, Horwitz shares their view. He is an energetic debunker, but he is also too generous a writer to settle for the easy way out. With his unerring eye for the strange and out-of-the-way, he manages to find in New Mexico a man known as El Patrón, an aging defender of the murderous conquistador Juan de Oñate. And he's a Democrat! Oñate cut the feet off his victims, but El Patrón is unconvinced of his villainy. "My God, Oñate made this place," he tells Horwitz. "He introduced cabbages, chili, tomatoes and what not. He created an irrigation system. Oñate did many things for Indians." Even in the United States-this present-oriented country supposedly so indifferent to its own history - the past obtrudes. This has long been Horwitz's theme, and rather than simply explaining it, he demonstrates the truth of it, in story after story. Yet there are times when his treatment seems unaccountably creaky and shopworn. Returning to Plymouth at book's end, Horwitz celebrates Thanksgiving with the townsfolk. As he has done with the conquistadors and the Norse and the French, he can't resist making the debunker's case about the "myths" surrounding the explorers and settlers. The Pilgrims probably didn't eat turkey or pumpkin pie at a Thanksgiving dinner that they didn't consider a thanksgiving and to which they didn't invite the natives, who were in any case weakened with disease, which made them vulnerable to looting - by the Pilgrims, who, by the way, weren't the first American settlers fleeing religious persecution; that was the Huguenots. The Pilgrims' arrival in America was, on balance, a calamity, which is why, nowadays, even Plymoutheans mark an annual "Day of Mourning." ISN'T this getting a bit old by now? We are three generations, maybe more, into an era in which the once-cheeky assertions of historical revisionism - Columbus didn't discover America, Europeans invented scalping, the founding fathers were real estate sharpies - have become utterly conventional, the refuge of grad-school plodders and boomer journalists alike. An inheritor and practitioner of this fraying tradition, Horwitz tries, to his credit, to complicate the picture, just a little. "I could chase after facts across early America, uncover hidden or forgotten 'truths,' explode fantasies about the country's founding," he writes. "But I'd failed to appreciate why these myths persisted. People needed them." While the old myths may be false in all their particulars, in other words, it's probably not so bad if the common folk comfort themselves with lies. Myths, in the words of Stephen Jay Gould, satisfy a "psychic need." But surely this is an unsatisfying conclusion. Are we really supposed to shrug off mass ignorance and self-delusion? If indeed that's what it is. Then again, maybe people have believed the historical myths for reasons beyond their own gullibility. Think how refreshing it would be for a writer of Horwitz's gifts to approach the task of pop history from the opposite direction - not to pick apart a myth but to explain those elements within it that are, after all, true. The myth of the Pilgrims, for example, comes in many shapes and sizes, each containing a different portion of factual accuracy. But underlying them all is what was once understood to be a basic fact: these battered and luckless wanderers carried with them a set of peculiar principles that slowly unfolded into a spectacularly successful experiment in freedom, prosperity and human dignity, something unforeseen and without parallel in all history. If our best writers delight in attacking the myth, it's probably because they no longer see this truth as self-evident. 'I'd mislaid an entire century, the one separating Columbus's sail ... from Jamestown's founding.' Andrew Ferguson is the author of "Land of Lincoln: Adventures in Abe's America."
Copyright (c) The New York Times Company [October 27, 2009]
Review by Booklist Review
*Starred Review* Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Horwitz has presented what could be described as a guide for those who are historically ignorant of the lost century between the first voyage of Columbus and the establishment of Jamestown in 1607. Despite his undergraduate degree in history, Horwitz includes himself in that group. In this informative, whimsical, and thoroughly enjoyable account, Horwitz describes the exploits of various explorers and conquistadores and enriches the stories with his own experiences when visiting some of the lands they discovered. He recounts the Viking settlement of Vinland and then visits Newfoundland. He offers a balanced view of Columbus' personality and accomplishments, placing him within the context of an epoch of great maritime innovation. He follows in the footsteps of Cabeza de Vaca, whose amazing wanderings across the southwest began when he was shipwrecked off the Gulf Coast of Texas. Coronado's trek in search of the fabled Seven Cities of Cibola is viewed as combining elements of farce and tragedy. As always, Horwitz writes in a breezy, engaging style, so this combination of popular history and travelogue will be ideal for general readers.--Freeman, Jay Copyright 2008 Booklist
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
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. "This is the friggin' beginning of America!" A Voyage Long and Strange is a history-fueled, self-imposed mission of rediscovery, a travelogue that sets out to explore the surprisingly long list of explorers who discovered America, and what discovered means anyway, starting with the Vikings in A.D. 1000, and ending up on the Mayflower. Horwitz (Blue Latitudes; Confederates in the Attic) even dons conquistador gear, making the narrative surprisingly fun and funny, even as he spends a lot of time describing just how badly Columbus and subsequently the Spanish treated people. (Highpoint: a trip to a Columbus battle site in the Dominican Republic, when Horwitz gets stuck with a nearly inoperable rental car in a Sargasso Sea of traffic.) In the course of tracing the routes of de Soto in, for instance, Tennessee, and the amazing Cabeza de Vaca (Daniel Day Lewis's next role?) in Tucson, Ariz., Horwitz drives off any given road to meet the back-to-the-land husband-and-wife team researching Coronado's expeditions through Mexico; or the Fed Ex guy who may be a link to the lost colonists of the Elizabethan Roanoke expedition. 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." Robert Sullivan is the author of Cross Country, How Not to Get Rich and Rats (Bloomsbury). (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Review by Library Journal Review
Realizing that his knowledge of American history between Columbus's discovery and Plymouth Rock over 100 years later was sketchy at best, Pulitzer Prize-winning former journalist Horwitz (Confederates in the Attic) sets out to educate himself with his own explorations. He intertwines his experiences retracing the early conquistadors, adventurers, and entrepreneurs through such regions as Newfoundland, the Dominican Republic, and the American South, Southwest, and New England with thoroughly researched accounts of the territories themselves, the natives who were historically affected, and the motives of the explorers. Along the way, Horwitz meets many interesting people who have studied and/or appropriated the early discoverers for their own purposes: a conquistador reenactor who likens De Soto to a drug lord, the Zuni tribe of New Mexico, an expert on 16th-century combat, the fraternal Improved Order of the Red Men, and the Dominican belief in a Columbus jinx. At the end of his journey, Horwitz recognizes that all the truths he uncovered will never quash the myths of American history, especially the Pilgrim mystique. This readable and vastly entertaining history travelog is highly recommended for public libraries.--Margaret Atwater-Singer, Univ. of Evansville Libs., IN (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Review by Kirkus Book Review
Irreverent, effervescent reexamination of early exploration in the Americas by peripatetic, Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Horwitz (The Devil May Care: 50 Intrepid Americans and Their Quest for the Unknown, 2003, etc.). What do Americans really know about the discovery of their continent? Visiting the sadly puny Plymouth Rock prompted this energetic, likable author to delve into the historic record and sniff out the real story behind America's creation myth, from one section of the country to the other. The Vikings arrived first around 1000 CE, when Leif Eiriksson settled for a spell in Newfoundland, enjoying the grapes and mild weather before being run off by the native Skraelings. Horwitz sought out the probable descendants of these natives, the Micmac, who invited him to a cleansing ceremony in their sweat lodge. Next, the author studied the mixed-up voyages of Columbus, whose ignorance of the globe led him to believe that the eastern Bahamas, where he first landed, was the Orient. While the Spanish were claiming the Caribbean, Mexico and Peru, Ponce de Le¿n, a veteran of Columbus's second voyage, struck Daytona Beach in 1513 and named the land La Florida. Alvar Nú¿ez Cabeza de Vaca made inroads through Florida and Texas between 1528 and 1536, while ruthless Hernando de Soto cut throughout the South a pitiless swath of destruction and slaughter of natives. These voyages came long before Sir Walter Raleigh sent English colonists to settle on Roanoke Island, Va., in 1585. By 1540, Francisco Vásquez de Coronado penetrated the Southwest from Mexico in search of fabled cities, and in Florida, a little-known Huguenot settlement established in 1564 at La Caroline was wiped out by Spanish invaders. The author revisited all of these sites to speak to the locals, who are often as colorful as the forgotten history he was tracking. Accessible to all ages, hands-on and immensely readable, this book invites readers to search out America's story for themselves. Copyright ©Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
