A Voyage Long and Strange: Rediscovering the New World

A VOYAGE LONG AND STRANGE: REDISCOVERING THE NEW WORLD; New York: Henry Holt, 2008; 408 pgs. (including the Notes on Sources, which you should read); Nonfiction.

Who could have guessed that history (and current events) could be so much fun. Horwitz, whose previous triumphs have included books about Civil War reenactments, travels in the Middle East, and a retracing of Captain Cook's voyages in the South Pacific, turns his gimlet eye on the first European forays into the New World. "Washing up" in Plymouth, Massachusetts one day on a New England road trip, he buys a beer at the Myles Standish Liquor store, beds down at the William Bradford inn, and then mocks (in his mind) the clueless tourists at Plymouth Rock. But as he mulls over his experience, he realizes how little (even as a history major) he knows about the origins of the land that became America. The rest, as they say, is history, and history of a most witty and enlightening kind. Who knew, for instance, that Juan Ponce de Leon came to Florida looking for gold and slaves like everyone else, and not for the Fountain of Youth? or that the man for whom the DeSoto touring car was named was a butcher of unequaled savagery? The first feast in the New World that might appropriately be called Thanksgiving took place in St. Augustine and probably consisted of a stew of salt pork and garbanzo beans.
(And there is some contention between Floridians and "the powdered wig" states over who should get credit for the national holiday.) A Voyage Long and Strange is a ball of laughs and a veil of tears--the offhand executions of women and children play out in the same text as deliberations upon whether moose is kosher and whether one should ride the "Trolley of the Doomed" in St. Tourist Trap, Florida. Horwitz goofs some stuff up--he thinks Mormons believe themselves to be descendants of the Nephites--but on the whole this is a fascinating, impossible-to-put-down look at where we came from and what we have become.

LW