Golf Travel Books: United States: A Voyage Long and Strange: On the Trail of Vikings, Conquistadors, Lost Colonists, and Other Adventurers in Early America

"Never mind his Pulitzer, the best-selling books, the writing jobs at The Wall Street Journal and The New Yorker: Tony Horwitz is a dope. Really, he'll tell you so himself, and often does, though not in so many words, in his funny and lively new travelogue, A Voyage Long and Strange. Horwitz is probably best known as the author of Confederates in the Attic, an exploration of how the American Civil War and its cultural backwash still move otherwise semi-normal Americans to do crazy things, like sleep outdoors in 19th-century-style long johns while pretending to be Abner Doubleday. In that book as in this one, Horwitz assumes the pose of a baby-boomer Everyman, overschooled but undereducated. He is chagrined at the basic historical facts he was once taught but can no longer remember or, worse, never knew to begin with. Like so many of us, he is the incarnation of Father Guido Sarducci’s Five Minute University, where degrees are awarded for reciting the two or three things the average liberal-arts graduate remembers from four years of college. In A Voyage Long and Strange, Horwitz is surprised to learn how little he knows about the Europeans who 'discovered' America. (One thing he does remember from college is to wrap those scare-quote marks around politically contentious words like 'discover.') His astonishing ignorance dawned on him during a visit to Plymouth Rock. 'I'd mislaid an entire century, the one separating Columbus's sail in 1492 from Jamestown’s founding in 16-0-something,' he writes. 'Expensively educated at a private school and university—a history major, no less!—I'd matriculated to middle age with a third grader's grasp of early America.' Horwitz resolves to remedy his ignorance by embarking on an intensive self-tutorial mixed with lots of reporting and running around. He looks for Columbus's remains in the Dominican Republic; tracks Coronado through Mexico, Texas and even Kansas; sifts evidence of the Vikings' landing in Newfoundland; and gives the Anglos their due in tidewater Virginia. The result is popular history of the most accessible sort. The pace never flags, even for easily distracted readers, because Horwitz knows how to quick-cut between historical narrative and a breezy account of his own travels. It's the same method he used in Confederates, deployed with the same success, and unlike many other, less journalistic histories, in which the material is displayed at a curator's remove, it has the immense value of injecting the past into the present—showing us history as an element of contemporary life, something that still surrounds us and presses in on us, whether we know it or not. Usually not. The stories he tells are full of vivid characters and wild detail . . . He is an energetic debunker."—Andrew Ferguson, The New York Times Book Review

"Horwitz traveled from Newfoundland to the Dominican Republic, throughout the American South and Southwest and up to New England, vastly different zones once equally uncharted, now distinct and unrelated. On the road, he spent part of his time reading historical books informing him of what happened in these spots, and then part of his time seeking out guides who led him to the sites, or shared the local lore as it has been handed down through the centuries. He has an ear for a good yarn and an instinct for the trail leading to an entertaining anecdote, and he deftly weaves his reportorial finds with his historical material."—Nina Burleigh, The Washington Post

“Honest, wonderfully written, and heroically researched . . . Horwitz unearths whole chapters of American history that have been ignored.”—The Boston Globe

"As a journalist, Horwitz is ever thorough, seeking out the most knowledgeable sources, asking all the important questions, and reporting facts in a manner that is clear and, for the most part, unbiased . . . Just the antidote for those of us who have clung helplessly to our shaky third-grade memories."—The Miami Herald

"Horwitz is a very funny writer, especially of long set pieces, and there is no shortage of material on the forgotten margins of the New World, where it all began."—Newsday

"Readers of Horwitz's 1998 classic about Civil War reenactors, Confederates in the Attic, won't need to be persuaded to pick up his latest work. Horwitz's turf stretches from the first Viking explorers to the landing of the Pilgrims—but it wouldn't be Horwitzian if he didn't also engage with their contemporary avatars, from the Vinland Motel (on Newfoundland's Viking Trail) to the Greek Outhouse (a local term for the neoclassical canopy hovering over Plymouth Rock and its surrounding patch of sand). This is a work of history, but it's also about what Americans do with (and to) that history."—Daniel Okrent, Fortune

"As always, Horwitz is a smart, hilarious, and informative guide."—Outside

"When people refer to 'Western civilization,' Fernandez-Armesto contends, 'they mean, essentially, an Atlantic continuum comprising parts of western Europe and much or most of the Americas,' which involved a projection of people and beliefs and ways of life that `was strictly unprecedented when it began.' From that perspective, the Pilgrims hardly loom large, and were late to the table as well. That is roughly the point of embarkation for Tony Horwitz, too, in his rich cultural travelogue, A Voyage Long and Strange, in which he visits far-flung sites and retraces extensive exploration routes of this continent taken by Europeans long before the arrival of the Mayflower . . . Reading A Voyage Long and Strange will seem like one's own first contact, coming face to face with an America remote from the pages of the daily newspaper but vibrantly alive and refreshingly various. By balancing the deep history—often bloody and chilling—against today's inhabitants, the apparently gregarious and certainly witty Horwitz has taken what would otherwise be a miscellany of experiences and turned them into a road show well worth following."—Art Winslow, Chicago Tribune

“By turns history and travelogue, A Voyage Long and Strange is instructive and charming. Horwitz sure can spin a yarn. He re-creates the wonder—and the horror—of the explorers' encounters with exotic creatures. And his thumbnail sketches of the first-comers are tight and bright.”—Glenn C. Altschuler, The Baltimore Sun

"Plymouth Rock is iconic in a uniquely American way, which is to say that most Americans know it is historically significant but have little idea why. In his wry historical travelogue, A Voyage Long and Strange: Rediscovering the New World, Tony Horwitz aims to fill that void and plenty of others between the year 1492, when Columbus sailed to the New World, and the early 1600s, when England established itself here. Horwitz colors those fuzzy years in the collective American memory with vivid characters and violent tales of early European exploits. He lends depth to stories that many Americans know, from disputed accounts of thanksgiving meals to t...