Take the Cannoli

Critical Acclaim for Sarah Vowell's
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; Vowell's voice has never sounded stronger, more alive, or more capable of saying just about anything as entertainingly as you're 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 Vowell's writing—it's 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 don't 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 strange—if it doesn't find her first.”

—Elizabeth Macklin,
US Weekly

“Sarah Vowell's 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)

“Vowell's 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. . . . Vowell's 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 Vowell's uncanny voice—by turns wise and wise-ass, wry and celebratory, heartrending and hilarious—translates 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 year's 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

E
PIGRAPH

Home Movies

S
HOOTING
D
AD

M
USIC
L
ESSONS

T
HE
E
ND
I
S
N
EAR
, N
EARER
, N
EAREST

Post Cards

T
AKE THE
C
ANNOLI

V
INDICTIVELY
A
MERICAN

T
HESE
L
ITTLE
T
OWN BLUES

C
HELSEA
G
IRL

M
ICHIGAN AND
W
ACKER

S
PECIES-ON
-S
PECIES
A
BUSE

Obituaries

W
HAT
I S
EE
W
HEN
I L
OOK AT THE
F
ACE ON THE
$20 B
ILL

I
XNAY ON THE
M
Y
W
AY

Mix Tapes

T
HANKS FOR THE
M
EMOREX

D
RIVE
T
HROUGH
P
LEASE

Y
OUR
D
REAM
, M
Y
N
IGHTMARE

D
ARK
C
IRCLES

A
MERICAN
G
OTH

A
CKNOWLEDGMENTS

A
BOUT
S
ARAH
V
OWELL

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 warn't 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 wouldn't 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. I'm not saying who was the Democrat or who was the Republican—my father or I—but 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 hunter's orange was never my color.

About the only thing my father and I agree on is the Constitution, though I'm partial to the First Amendment, while he's always favored the Second.

I am a gunsmith's 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, Dad's 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 Oklahoma—a 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 don't 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, I'm 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 didn't end in an argument.

Our house was partitioned off into territories. While the kitchen and the living room were well within the DMZ, the respective work spaces governed by my father and me were jealously guarded totalitarian states in which each of us declared ourselves dictator. Dad's shop was a messy disaster area, a labyrinth of lathes. Its walls were hung with the mounted antlers of deer he'd bagged, forming a makeshift museum of death. The available flat surfaces were buried under a million scraps of paper on which he sketched his mechanical inventions in blue ball-point pen. And the floor, carpeted with spiky metal shavings, was a tetanus shot waiting to happen. My domain was the cramped, cold space known as the music room. It was also a messy disaster area, an obstacle course of musical instruments—piano, trumpet, baritone horn, valve trombone, various percussion doodads (bells!), and recorders. A framed portrait of the French composer Claude Debussy was nailed to the wall. The available flat surfaces were
buried under piles of staff paper, on which I penciled in the pompous orchestra music given titles like “Prelude to the Green Door” (named after an O. Henry short story by the way, not the watershed porn flick
Behind the Green Door
) I starting writing in junior high.