Sarah Vowell - Take the Cannoli: Stories from the New World

Critical Acclaim for Sarah Vowells Take the Cannoli

Sarah Vowell is laugh-out-loud funny... a sassy storyteller who can warm your heart, and teach you a lesson.

Crystal Dempsey, The Charlotte Observer

The sixteen pieces here form an engaging whole; Vowells voice has never sounded stronger, more alive, or more capable of saying just about anything as entertainingly as youre likely to hear it.

Michaelangelo Matos, Seattle Weekly

Take the Cannoli is a surprisingly successful assessment of American life free from the trappings of grandiosity.

Joshua Klein, The Onion

I love Sarah Vowells writingits smart, funny, soulful, even educational. This wonderful collection is about democracy, sleep, religion, pop music, and just about everything else that matters, and if you dont find something in here that makes perfect sense to you, I can only imagine that you gave up reading, thinking, and laughing some time ago.

Nick Hornby

Delightful, disarmingly funny essays.

David Daley, Chicago Sun-Times

She travels from New Jersey to Disney World to Montana, writing with ease and humor on a stunning diversity of topics.

Catherine McNicol Stock, Chicago Tribune

As she makes clear in these insightful and wickedly funny reportorial essays, Sarah Vowell has a knack for seeking out the strangeif it doesnt find her first.

Elizabeth Macklin, US Weekly

Sarah Vowells collection of autobiographical essays, Take the Cannoli , reveals her quirky upbringing and humor.... Reading her collection is like tagging along on a great journey worth taking.

April Brown, The Dallas Morning News

Sarah Vowell is fresh, poignant, intimate, and funny.

Brian McKay, The Commercial Appeal (Memphis, TN)

Vowells ability to embrace pop culture (Disney, Sinatra, Goth, etc.) with historical savvy makes Take the Cannoli a highly relevant collection of essays.

Jay Kirk, The Philadelphia Inquirer

In these sharp, funny, disarming, and frighteningly intelligent essays, Sarah Vowell displays a wisdom far beyond her years. Take the Cannoli should formally qualify her for the position of national treasure.

David Sedaris

Delightful.

Larry Powell, The Dallas Morning News

Vowell presents a wonderfully eclectic mix of smart-witted, often hilarious personal essays.... Vowells crafty writing, often free-spirited and sometimes neurotic, is like literary stand-up comedy with a lot of heart and perfect delivery.

Kirkus Reviews

A good storyteller can engage, provoke, and intrigue in a few pages or a matter of moments. A great storyteller can accomplish all that while reflecting on something as mundane as an Italian dessert or a Midwestern bridge.... Vowell proves to be the latter.

Publishers Weekly

Sarah Vowells uncanny voiceby turns wise and wise-ass, wry and celebratory, heartrending and hilarioustranslates seamlessly to the page: equal parts Betty Boop and Dorothy Parker, Mark Twain and Walt Whitman, Woody Guthrie and Arlo Guthrie. She pegs herself as a typical American mutt. American she undoubtedly (unabashedly!) is, but typical? Hardly. This American Mutt is easily the years Best in Show.

Lawrence Weschler

Sharp and engaging.

Booklist

On her bumper-car ride across America with the top down, from guns to godfathers to goths, from Sinatra to Ginsberg to Don Corleone, Sarah Vowell is original, funny, bracing, pixilated, insightful, untouched by cheap irony, unburdened by glib agendas, a breath of fresh air, a true new star.

Steve Erickson

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FOR G REIL M ARCUS AND D AVID R AKOFF

I love songs about horses, railroads, land, judgment day, family, hard times, whiskey, courtship, marriage, adultery, separation, murder, war, prison, rambling, damnation, home, salvation, death, pride, humor, piety, rebellion, patriotism, larceny, determination, tragedy, rowdiness, heartbreak and love. And Mother. And God.

J OHNNY C ASH

All I wanted was to go somewheres; all I wanted was a change, I warnt particular.

H UCK F INN ON HELL

IF YOU WERE PASSING BY the house where I grew up during my teenage years and it happened to be before Election Day, you wouldnt have needed to come inside to see that it was a house divided. You could have looked at the Democratic campaign poster in the upstairs window and the Republican one in the downstairs window and seen our home for the Civil War battleground it was. Im not saying who was the Democrat or who was the Republicanmy father or Ibut I will tell you that I have never subscribed to Guns & Ammo, that I did not plaster the family vehicle with National Rifle Association stickers, and that hunters orange was never my color.

About the only thing my father and I agree on is the Constitution, though Im partial to the First Amendment, while hes always favored the Second.

I am a gunsmiths daughter. I like to call my parents house, located on a quiet residential street in Bozeman, Montana, the United States of Firearms. Guns were everywhere: the so-called pretty ones like the circa 1850 walnut muzzleloader hanging on the wall, Dads clients fixer-uppers leaning into corners, an entire rack right next to the TV. I had to move revolvers out of my way to make room for a bowl of Rice Krispies on the kitchen table.

I was eleven when we moved into that Bozeman house. We had never lived in town before, and this was a college town at that. We came from Oklahomaa dusty little Muskogee County nowhere called Braggs. My parents property there included an orchard, a horse pasture, and a couple of acres of woods. I knew our lives had changed one morning not long after we moved to Montana when, during breakfast, my father heard a noise and jumped out of his chair. Grabbing a BB gun, he rushed out the front door. Standing in the yard, he started shooting at crows. My mother sprinted after him screaming, Pat, you might ought to check, but I dont think they do that up here! From the look on his face, she might as well have told him that his American citizenship had been revoked. He shook his head, mumbling, Why, shooting crows is a national pastime, like baseball and apple pie. Personally, I preferred baseball and apple pie. I looked up at those crows flying away and thought, Im going to like it here.

Dad and I started bickering in earnest when I was fourteen, after the 1984 Democratic National Convention. I was so excited when Walter Mondale chose Geraldine Ferraro as his running mate that I taped the front page of the newspaper with her picture on it to the refrigerator door. But there was some sort of mysterious gravity surge in the kitchen. Somehow, that picture ended up in the trash all the way across the room.

Nowadays, I giggle when Dad calls me on Election Day to cheerfully inform me that he has once again canceled out my vote, but I was not always so mature. There were times when I found the fact that he was a gunsmith horrifying. And just weird. All he ever cared about were guns. All I ever cared about was art. There were years and years when he hid out by himself in the garage making rifle barrels and I holed up in my room reading Allen Ginsberg poems, and we were incapable of having a conversation that didnt end in an argument.