A dazzling survey of some three centuries of American history through a close reading of a metaphor ... I think reading Two Ships would be an excellent way to observe this particular Fourth of July.
An engrossing intellectual history ... His two metaphorical ships carry a heavy cargo of intellectual freight. However, with his nuanced unraveling of sometimes dauntingly tangled ideas and his always crisp prose he avoids the pitfalls of oversimplification and excessive detail.
If you read only one American history book this summer, shame on you, but make it David S. Reynolds’s Two Ships ... Reynolds’s powerful demonstration is that his story — the symbolism of the two ships — is not his. It was ubiquitous in American political rhetoric until, happily, it no longer was, as the nation transcended old categories ... Like any binary applied to a complex society, the two-ships division always obscured and distorted much ... Reynolds’s two ships, whose voyages though the nation’s memory lasted more than two centuries, have sailed far over history’s horizon. Good riddance.
A narrative, like Reynolds’s, that squeezes everything into a single frame must be able to account for both the American Revolution and the Civil War, the two formative events of American history. That’s asking a lot, and I don’t think he succeeds ... It also seems presumptuous. Do we really wish to regard those on one side of our current divide as the heirs of all that is best in the American tradition, and those on the other side as the legatees of slavery and domination? Where does that leave us? It’s instructive that Reynolds cites only one major figure in the 19th century who steadfastly rejected the imagery of cultural polarity: Abraham Lincoln.
An animated look at the tortured history of American slavery ... There’s a bit of nonsense. Despite writing a book about slavery, Reynolds never actually calls anyone the word 'slave' ... But in the big majority, Two Ships is excellent and fast-paced ... A religious tug-of-war happens throughout the book, and Reynolds, author of a book on John Brown, is insightful about every aspect of it.
Resurfaces a once commonplace American rhetorical device in this captivating study ... Reynolds’s most fascinating finding is the extent to which thinking about the English Civil War animated political discourse leading up to both the American Revolution and the American Civil War. Readers will find this a wonderfully original take on U.S. history.
