Amazon's review says, "The Marquis de Lafayette, a.k.a. one of George Washington's best buds, is the subject of Sarah Vowell's latest offering. Why would a young French aristocrat venture to our shores to join Washington's army and fight in the Revolutionary War? He came for the glory! He came because he believed in American ideals! But, mainly it was for the Enlightenment ideas that were unevenly embraced by many of his fellow comrades—ideas that impacted the war. Anyone familiar with Vowell’s oeuvre knows what a knack she has for making the (seemingly) mundane fascinating. She also draws some oddly comforting parallels between that time and our own (turns out that politicians have been butting heads and acting like idiots, since the birth of our great nation)."

From the publisher: "From the author of Lafayette in the Somewhat United States, , New York Times best-selling author Sarah Vowell's exploration of the Puritans and their journey to America to become the people of John Winthrop's "city upon a hill" - a shining example, a "city that cannot be hid." To this day, America views itself as a Puritan nation, but Vowell investigates what that means - and what it should mean. What was this great political enterprise all about? What Vowell discovers is something far different from what their uptight shoe-buckles-and-corn reputation might suggest. The people she finds are highly literate, deeply principled, and surprisingly feisty. Their story is filled with pamphlet feuds, witty courtroom dramas, and bloody vengeance. Sarah Vowell's special brand of armchair history makes the bizarre and esoteric fascinatingly relevant and fun. She takes us from the modern-day reenactment of an Indian massacre to the Mohegan Sun casino, from old-timey Puritan poetry, where "righteousness" is rhymed with "wilderness," to a Mayflower-themed waterslide. Thou shalt enjoy it."

I recommended this to David on WSIRN Episode 204. This book has been called a beach read for history geeks. Sarah Vowell is a NPR commentator who is a little bit cultural historian, a little bit comedian. The setup here is that she decides that she's interested in history. So what she decides to do is take a road trip to visit the sites that are in any way relevant to presidential assassinations that actually succeeded. And then some that didn't. She goes to the big locations, of course, like the theatre where Lincoln was shot, but she also goes to museums, statues, libraries, fields that are believed to have artifacts or connections to the assassination, historic sites, anything that has anything to do with the assassination. She's writing about a serious part of history, obviously tragedies in American history. And yet the way she relates the story, her adventures and her interactions with people helping her, some willing, some just happen to be manning the desk at the museum are just so funny. This is the kind of book that you didn't know you wanted to read until you pick it up and start reading it and realize this is what my reading life has been missing.

An irreverent take on the history of Hawai’i the publisher describes as "examining the place where Manifest Destiny got a sunburn." Only Sarah Vowell can take whaling, royalty, missionaries, con men, sugar barons, imperialism, US presidents, and a coup and combine them to this wry and witty effect.