Then Meditation

"The Wordy Shipmates" relies more on documents than on tourist attractions -- making it, in the words of one Vowell friend, "not so much road trip as head trip." Still, she did spend some time on the road. What sites might she want to show an interviewer if they could flee this greige purgatory?

"The Massachusetts Bay Colony tour isn't quite as action-packed as even the President Garfield tour," she says. But perhaps we could start in "this alley in downtown Boston behind the Winthrop Building," the city's first steel-framed skyscraper, which sits atop the site of John Winthrop's house.

If you're having trouble placing Mr. Winthrop, he's the leader of the band of Puritan colonists who did not gain eternal renown by landing at Plymouth Rock in 1620 and chowing down thankfully with the Indians. Winthrop's people showed up a decade later, founded Boston and were far more important than the Pilgrims in shaping what became these United States -- though Winthrop himself is now best known for the sound bite about "a city upon a hill" that Ronald Reagan cribbed from him and quoted endlessly out of context.

Vowell loves Winthrop for writing what she calls "one of the most beautiful sentences in the English language": "We must delight in each other, make others' conditions our own, rejoice together, mourn together, labor and suffer together, always having before our eyes our commission and community in the work, our community as members of the same body."

After Sept. 11, 2001, she writes, "when we were mourning together, when we were suffering together," she finally understood what the old Puritan meant.

This is Vowell at her most serious, and there's plenty of seriousness in "The Wordy Shipmates." Still, she rarely lets more than a paragraph or two go by without livening things up.

Take this typical then-meets-now analogy: "The Old Testament Israelites are to the Puritans what the blues was to the Rolling Stones -- a source of inspiration, a renewable resource of riffs." Or take the one she employs while describing the first full-scale massacre of Colonial New England's Indian wars, in which the Puritans ended up burning hundreds of Pequot men, women and children alive.

"The buildup to the Pequot War," she writes, "reminds me of what skateboarders call the frustration that makes them occasionally break their own skateboards in half -- 'focusing your board.' The Pequot War is just that -- a destructive tantrum brought on by an accumulation of aggravation."

Not an analogy you'll likely find in your high school history text.

Vowell "has never seen any reason why an interest in history should preclude an interest in popular culture," notes her friend Nick Hornby, the English novelist. "In a way, she makes you wonder about the rest of them, the historians who would never dream of making a pop-culture analogy." Part of the answer, Hornby thinks, is that "there's so much intellectual insecurity in high-culture pursuits," while Vowell is not only "very smart" but "confident in her smartness."

"I just try not to be generic" is Vowell's own explanation. In her former life as a music critic, she established a "personal moratorium on what I call inter-rock analogies." It was boring to compare Soundgarden with Nirvana. She wanted to compare them to "I don't know what, a pastry, or something that was just more interesting."

Vowell has almost as many former lives as current ones. But they somehow blend together, rather than clash. This makes her far more interesting than she'd be if she'd either stayed in her native Oklahoma or been born in Manhattan, where she lives now.