The Partly Cloudy Patriot by Sarah Vowell

The nineteen essays in this book are a bit of a time capsule, by which I mostly mean that it’s funny to look back on the US presidential election of 2000 from 2020. (That election, incidentally, was the first one in which I voted/was old enough to vote, and I, like Sarah Vowell, rode in a car from NYC to DC for the protests that accompanied George W. Bush’s inauguration in January 2001.) A lot of the essays are about US politics or US history in some way, which means this isn’t totally the book for me (I’m not a politics nerd, unlike some people I know) but I do like Vowell’s style, and even if the essays resonated with me less than essays on another topic might have, this was an enjoyable read. Vowell is good at the snappy first line, like this, from “The First Thanksgiving,” which is one of my favorite pieces in the book: “When I invited my mom and dad to come to New York City to have Thanksgiving at my house, I never expected them to say yes” (9).

My absolute favorite piece in the book is “God Will Give You Blood to Drink in a Souvenir Shot Glass,” in which Vowell talks about historical walking tours and why her favorite parts of US history are “Puritan New England and the Civil War” and why she likes visiting/learning about places where terrible things happened in the past. I also really liked “California as an Island” (about how Vowell lived in San Francisco when she was in her twenties and worked at a gallery that sold old maps, and about California vs. elsewhere) and “Underground Lunchroom,” about the cafeteria in Carlsbad Caverns.


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