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A Voyage Long and Strange | 
 enlarge | Author: Tony Horwitz
Publisher: audible.com
Category: Book
List Price: $31.95
Buy New: $16.78
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Rating:  41 reviews
Media: Audio Download
ASIN: B001FVJI8I
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Product Description
On a chance visit to Plymouth Rock, Tony Horwitz makes an unsettling discovery. A history buff since early childhood, expensively educated at university a history major, no less! he s reached middle age with a third-grader s grasp of early America. In fact, he s mislaid more than a century of American history, the period separating Columbus s landing in 1492 from the arrival of English colonists at Jamestown in 160-something. Did nothing happen in between?
Horwitz decides to find out, and in A Voyage Long and Strange he uncovers the neglected story of America s founding by Europeans. He begins a thousand years ago, with the Vikings, and then tells the dramatic tale of conquistadors, castaways, French voyageurs, Moorish slaves, and many others who roamed and rampaged across half the states of the present-day U.S. continent, long before the Mayflower landed.
To explore this history and its legacy in the present, Horwitz embarks on an epic quest of his own trekking in search of grape-rich Vinland, Ponce de Leon s Fountain of Youth, Coronado s Cities of Gold, Walter Raleigh s Lost Colonists, and other mysteries of early America. And everywhere he goes, Horwitz probes the revealing gap between fact and legend, between what we enshrine and what we forget.
An irresistible blend of history, myth, and misadventure, A Voyage Long and Strange allows us to rediscover the New World for ourselves.
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| Customer Reviews: Read 36 more reviews...
 Four and a half stars... December 1, 2008
I have been a long-time fan of Tony Horwitz, and always look forward to his historic-based, quirky and entertaining books. A Journey Long and Strange: Rediscovering the New World follows his usual formula in traveling in the steps of history. In this case, he follows in the steps of America's early explorers.
While vacationing in New England, Horwitz visits Plymouth Rock (more like Plymouth Pebble, he laments). This former history major realized that what he didn't know about American's early explorers was a "chasm." He discovers that he "mislaid an entire century, the one separating Columbus's sail in 1492 from Jamestown's founding in 10-0-something." This story actually ends at Plymouth Rock, rather than begins.
As with his previous books, Horwitz sets off to travel the routes of the explorers that he studies. He begins with the Vikings. Then he switches to Columbus, Coronado, DeSoto and other Spanish explorers. It wasn't until the French made their appearance on American soil that the English finally arrived. So why is Plymouth a "rock star for tourists?" "Anglo bias seemed the obvious culprit, but it didn't altogether explain Americans' amnesia."
Like Horwitz, there was much that I didn't remember about early American history as well. I certainly didn't remember that Coronado traveled as far as Kansas from Mexico, or that DeSoto reached the Mississippi River from Florida. I never knew that the French had a presence in Florida. But Horwitz is known for presenting these facts with various anecdotes that are funny, ironic, thought-provoking or in some cases, tragic. In discussing our national celebration of Thanksgiving, Horwitz writes "FDR moved Thanksgiving ahead a week, to lengthen the Christmas shopping season. And there it has remained, a day of national gluttony, retail pageantry, TV football, and remembrance of the Pilgrims, a folk so austere that they regarded Christmas as a corrupt Papist holiday."
The one major omission (Horwitz admits as much) in A Journey Long and Strange is that the famous French explorer, Samuel Champlain, gets nary a mention. After reading David Hackett Fischer's wonderful new book, Champlain's Dream, I think that Champlain's absence makes the story less rich and cost him half a star in my rating. But overall, Horwitz sums things up in a way you won't find in most history books: "The country's European founding was slow and messy: a primordial slime of false starts and mutations that evolved, over generations, into English colonies and the United States."
 History is Fun November 30, 2008
Tony Horwitz does the leg work for us. Read and discover some of the history you were never taught in school. Add some zing to your home library, read Horwitz.
A very readable introduction to early American history November 25, 2008
In his typical humorous and inquisitive style, Tony Horwitz sets to trace the roots of the "discovery" of America, and more importantly - to dispel some of the most prevalent myths around it.
It appears that most Americans believe that Columbus discovered America and that the US soil was first colonized by pilgrims aboard the Mayflower, that landed in Plymouth (a bit south of modern Boston) in 1620. The truth is far from that. Horwitz spends the 400 pages of this book telling about the real story behind America's colonization, starting with Viking discoverers at the turn of the first millennium, through first Spanish and French settlements and finally the founding of Jamestown, a colony in Virginia that preceded Plymouth by several years.
The book is composed of two intermixed themes. The one is a historical account, facts and research the author gleaned from the all material he could find on the subject (and in the end of the book you can see a quite complete bibliography). The other is a more personal story of Horwitz's own travels through the sites he describes in his historical accounts, trying to find traces of history and talking with local people. In his discussions, he mainly tries to dig up the "hard questions" - of why some historical facts are popularized and spread, and others, while objectively more important, are forgotten and sometimes even knowingly hidden.
There are a couple of nice quotes on his conclusions near the end of the book. This is from page 387:
[...] "So you're saying we should honor myth rather than fact?" I asked. "Precisely." [...] "Myth is more important than history. History is arbitrary, a collection of facts. Myth we choose, we create, we perpetuate". [...] "The story here may not be correct, but it transcends truth. It's like religion - beyond facts. Myth trumps fact, always does, always has, always will."
And from page 390:
Gould attributed this to "the psychic need for an indigenous creation myth." Humans, whether contemplating the genesis of their customs or of their species, yearn to locate "an explicit point of origin," rather than accept that most beginnings are gradual and complex. "Creation myths," he concluded, "identify heroes and sacred places, while evolutionary stories provide no palpable, particular thing as a symbol for reference, worship, or patriotism."
Interesting points to ponder on how "pop history" is formed and maintained, indeed.
I wouldn't call it a great book, and it's not even one of Horwitz's best books, but "A voyage long and strange" is well written and fun to read. If you're interested in the history of America's colonization, you can do much worse than start with this readable introduction, and dig into its sources for more eclectic research.
Horwitz writes another winner. November 18, 2008
1 out of 1 found this review helpful
I was a big fan of Tony Horwitz's other works and this new offering did not fail to disappoint. He is able to weave history and humor into a volume that is hard to put down. It should be on every high school history students' reading list (or college for that matter). As our nation continues to struggle with its identity in the modern era, this book gives a foundation for where and how it all began. Anyone even remotely interested in travel and history will be entertained by this well researched tome.
Myth trumps facts October 17, 2008
Half history, half travelogue. The history covered in this book is pretty much ignored by our educational system which focuses on the pilgrims of 1620 while the much earlier explorations and settlements are generally ignored. This book helps fill those holes.
During the author's travels as he researches these histories, he meets a number of fascinating characters who add color and interest to the narrative.
The conclusion of the author is that myth always trumps facts. Our creation story is based on the myths surrounding the pilgrims and ignores the facts of earlier explorations.
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