" The first of Sarah Vowell's books that had me drifting. For a book where the thesis was meant to be that the early Massachusetts settlers were big on education and reading, she abandons that pretty quickly and heads off into 'boy, those guys were kind of jerks' territory. Which, let's be honest, most folks picking this up aren't going to be entirely unaware of just how jerky our early settlers were. When she finally got around to the stuff about the Pequot War and Anne Hutchinson I was more interested, but that's practically the last third of the book. For the most part it functions as a snapshot of a few decades of John Winthrop's (Massachusetts hero, early American dickbag) life more than anything else. Unlike Assassination Vacation, I felt that this book really lacked the charm that Sarah's voice brings, which left the material a little too dry for me. And that's my fault. I'm a product of Generation Rx and there's only so much attention I can pay at any time. But I got a lot out of Assassination Vacation and the Partly Cloudy Patriot. I didn't get nearly that much out of The Wordy Shipmates and I wish I had. "
— Bahimiron, 2/11/2014