A One-Book Sunday Mail Haul!

Added: 2026-05-25

[00:00:00]Hello, book. Well, as I predicted yesterday, uh the altered schedule of delivery for weekend mail did indeed mean that I got more mail yesterday, but I got it late. Awful late. Uh and I don't know why, but my first thought when I saw it was, well, it's too late to make videos, so I might as well open it. Uh cuz it's fun to open packages that you get in the mail. Uh and it was only belatedly that I realized, no, no, you could save this. they could let these packages sit here on the shelf and wait until tomorrow. Uh, and by that point, there was only one package that I had not already opened. So, we will open that. We will do a one package mail haul today. Uh, I could show you the others.

[00:00:40]They were an odd mix uh of finished copies of unpromising stuff so that we would just be going over the same unpromising stuff again.

[00:00:49]and also uh plenty of print and paper books for the trade journals. I do a lot of of reviewing for the trade journals and ordinarily all of that is uh electronic.

[00:01:03]It used to be before before the pandemic it was all print and paper but since the pandemic it's been mostly all electronic and uh it wasn't yesterday for some reason. Uh but that still leaves us with one package and we we this way we can focus on this one book to exclusion of all else. So let's hope uh that it is not yet another copy of Hammer of the Gods. That would be the worst possible outcome here. If it's if it's a double of some kind, let's see what it is uh and what we can talk about it. Oh, okay. Uh well, this is a finished copy of something that we've already seen.

[00:01:40]Uh this comes out, I believe, in June.

[00:01:43]Is that right? Yes. Early June, so two weeks. Uh, so you know, if you get if you get a book like this, let's say you didn't get the advanced copy, two weeks is too short a time for you to pitch this to a print and paper editor if there are any print and paper editors left who would run a book review.

[00:02:00]They're already going to have their their space planned for that time. Uh, probably true for literary journals as well. If they're going to assign this, they will have signed it already. Uh, but uh, let's see here. So this is David Reynolds. This is his book, Two Ships, Jamestown 1619 and Plymouth 1620, the struggle for the soul of America in the finished copy. Rather nice looking finished copy. Uh which has a bunch of blurbs. Library Journal, Kirkus, That Was Not Me. Uh Henry Lewis Gates, John Meechum, Alan Taylor, Sean Willins. Wow, big blurbs. Are they on here as well?

[00:02:37]Yeah, they are. They're And Brenda Wineapple's on here as well. Uh, let's see here. American America's divisions didn't begin recently or even in 1776.

[00:02:48]In the bitterly polarized decades leading up to the American Civil War, it was common place to argue that America's strife could be traced back to 1619 and 1620 with the arrival of two ships. The ship that brought the first enslaved Africans to Jamestown and the Mayflower, which brought the pilgrims to Plymouth Rock.

[00:03:07]Now on the eve of the nation's 25 250th anniversary, that origin story comes back into focus in this book uh which traces the roots of American division through the prism of these two ships, illuminating a battle of ideas that continues to shape our conversations about identity, authority, equality, and the future of the country.

[00:03:26]Okay. Well, it's a pub sheet, right? So you you got to you got to say something about the book. Uh it does these two ships do not illuminate any of those things. Now those things are now settled. They're now done. Uh, the bad guys won. So, regardless of which of these two ships you think is the good guys and which you think is the bad guys, the there's not an open question anymore. Uh, Reynolds shows us that those two ships invoked by Frederick Douglas and many others stood for two quite distinct realities. The Puritans and the Cavaliers, names and ideologies born in the bloodshed of the English Civil War. The Virginia colony founded by royalists was steeped in the ideas of divine right which flowed down in rigid patriarchal hierarchies. Every colony was founded by royalists.

[00:04:11]Uh Plymouth colonies dissenters to the king and his church. No. No.

[00:04:17]Uh while hardly perfect carried the seeds of a more egalitarian political vision. Did they indeed? Unless you're a woman. Unless you're one half of the population. Uh the two ships in 1619 to 1620 played a key role in the battles of the images and words that marked the roing fight and then war over slavery.

[00:04:37]As the author shows, there is a long stretch of time in America when everyone knew what cavaliers and Puritans meant.

[00:04:43]It was north versus south, but more deeply it was about whether social hierarchy was the natural order of things. That's well put. Uh but then as America descended into the long night of Jim Crow, the metaphor of the two ships went to sleep as well.

[00:04:59]The meaning of the Mayflower and of Thanksgiving changed as they became mainstream apolitical ideas.

[00:05:07]They're apolitical ideas unless this was your land. [laughter] Then you're not giving thanks for anything. if you were being booted off your own land. Uh if the ship's status as a cultural touch points before the Civil War tells us something vivid or vital about conflict, their forgetting afterwards tells us much about why the road to true equality has proved so stony.

[00:05:30]Uh, as we reflect on our nation's first 250 years and look ahead to its future, this book offers a powerful reckoning with the origins of our deepest divisions as well as the possibilities that have always existed alongside them.

[00:05:46]Okay. Well, I'm not going to I mean, the the the finished copy happens to get to me uh you know, in in the same 7-day stretch as it becomes pretty obvious that in very little time, a year, two years at the most, black people will not be able to vote in this country. And hard on the heels of that will be women.

[00:06:09]So, you know, the the the the meta discussion here, which is the thing that that publicists always want to evoke in their sheet, and this pub sheet is well written.

[00:06:20]You're not going to be able to review this book in that lens. You're not going to be able to do it. Or you could, but but you'd be your review would be entirely about the current day headlines. It wouldn't be about this book. And this is a good author. He deserves your in a review of this book.

[00:06:33]He deserves your attention. So, the way I mean this pub sheet is casting the entire book in a way that you should ignore. If you're reviewing it, you should ignore it. I'll do my best to ignore it when I review it. Uh, so who's the author? He's written a lot of books that I've liked. I know that. Uh, Walt Whitten's America, um, Beneath the American Renaissance.

[00:06:57]Why am there's one other that I'm uh that I'm remembering that I kind of that I kind of sort of liked. Oh, right. Uh Abe his his biography of Abraham Lincoln was pretty good. Also, he wrote a book about um uh Andrew Jackson that I'm not I'm not seeing on here that I liked as well. But anyway, he is a well-known quantity to me. I I I trust him as a writer. So, great. All right. Well, this comes out very soon and I uh have not read it. I need to I need to get to that. Of course, of course, there's an element of reluctance, right? Because the I I myself the reviewer shouldn't read the pub sheet, I don't think. Uh back in a long long time ago, uh right at the dawn of pubsh sheets.

[00:07:41]Once upon a time, books like this didn't books didn't come with pubsh sheets.

[00:07:44]They came we've seen them in older books. They came with just an index card saying here's a complimentary copy. If you run a review, please send two copies of that review to this address.

[00:07:55]nothing else. Nothing else nothing about the book. It was it was it was assumed that you knew about the book that you had been eagerly waiting for it that you knew about the subject matter. Uh that isn't assumed anymore. And right at the time when that was starting um it was a standard practice with a lot of main venue review editors to keep the pub sheet just just send the reviewer the book. And this is one of the reasons why because that PUBG sheet is trying to shape a review. And it's a review that simply won't fly. It's in in 2026 going on into the 2040s. It absolutely will not fly. You cannot you cannot posit a review of this that says these are two rival visions of America's future and are they at odds and which will win? Actually, they're one vision of America's future.

[00:08:51]uh the uh the abolitionist movement that that sprang up in the New England that was founded by the Puritans was [snorts] objected to by the majority of the new of New England. Uh so and slavery is of course wholeheartedly endorsed in the Bible that they held as the way not only for their faith but to organize society.

[00:09:11]So good luck if you're a woman in that society. Good luck if you're an atheist in that society. Uh but these are actually the same vision. An intensely patriarchal Christofascist and unbelievably racist view of [snorts] the nature of America, the future of America, Doug Wilson's America. And that vision won.

[00:09:32]That vision is now anyway, you can see what I'm saying. The the the present day realities are the last thing you want to bring into a review of this book. Instead, you want to do the classic uh Steve Donghue, David Murphy thing of go to the back and check, you know, how deeply grounded this is and in what sources. But anyway, that's our one book mail, the finished copy of Two Ships, which now I'm thinking about it, I'm wondering if we ever did see the advanced copy. It's right over there. But I, like I said, I'm going to I have a shelf of uh work books, all the print and paper copies for the trade journals, and all of the galleys and finished copies for upcoming American releases. And I it's a mess. an absolute mess and I'm going to ignore it. I'm going to ignore it until the 1 of June when I when I will or thereabouts the end of the month. I'll ignore it to the end of the month when I will organize it. Uh then and see how what kind of job I do. Maybe I'll even have company doing it. Uh but anyway, I'm going to wrap this up. That was a one book mail haul. I will be back.

[00:10:32]Banking mode two.