A Voyage Long and Strange

Rediscovering the New World

By: Tony Horwitz

Narrated by: John H. Mayer

On a chance visit to Plymouth Rock, Tony Horwitz makes an unsettling discovery. A history buff since early childhood, expensively educated at university—a history major, no less!—he’s reached middle age with a third-grader’s grasp of early America. In fact, he’s mislaid more than a century of American history, the period separating Columbus’s landing in 1492 from the arrival of English colonists at Jamestown in 160-something. Did nothing happen in between?

Horwitz decides to find out, and in A VOYAGE LONG AND STRANGE he uncovers the neglected story of America’s founding by Europeans. He begins a thousand years ago, with the Vikings, and then tells the dramatic tale of conquistadors, castaways, French voyageurs, and many others who roamed and rampaged across half the states of the present-day U.S. continent, long before the Mayflower landed.

To explore this history and its legacy in the present, Horwitz embarks on an epic quest of his own—trekking in search of grape-rich Vinland, Ponce de León’s Fountain of Youth, Coronado’s Cities of Gold, Walter Raleigh’s Lost Colonists, and other mysteries of early America. And everywhere he goes, Horwitz probes the revealing gap between fact and legend, between what we enshrine and what we forget.

An irresistible blend of history, myth, and misadventure, A VOYAGE LONG AND STRANGE allows us to rediscover the New World for ourselves.©2008 Tony Horwitz; (P)2008 Books on Tape

History meets myth

The story was interesting at times, but tended to get bogged down into minutia from time to time and the author also made some tortured and tenuous cultural connections between history and modern day meaning. I found Tony Horwitz's book "Confederates in the Attic" to be better. This was still a very good book and I enjoyed traveling on the authors adventure. As far as technical quality of the audiobook, the reader was excellent and was easy to listen to. No complaints there.

a historical travelogue

much more a travelogue than a straight history. works pretty well though, nice selection of facts and places, once past the first section (Vikings)

Funny, informative, insightful, entertaining.

Determined to learn more about early America than his education in history provided him, Tony Horwitz set out to research the written record, and travel to all of these historic places, collecting enough information along the way to write this book. But this is not a dry, dense, "just the facts, ma'am" type of history book. Most of the story lies in the people who Horwitz visits in his travels. From Hispañiola to New Mexico, to Florida, Virginia and finally back to Plymouth Rock, He finds local people who are well qualified to have opinions about the local history. The opinions of these people, combined with the author's observations and the written record, serve to weave a story not just about early America, but about the way that all histories are written. Horwitz has a great ability to find the humor and silliness in all of this, and the narrator, John H Mayor, does a splendid job of bringing that across. I found myself smiling, chuckling, and sometimes even laughing out loud at the absurdity of it all. Meanwhile, my mind was enriched with accounts of tales that should be common knowledge, but are not the stories that the winners of American history passed on, so therefore are little known. It was one of those books that I got so involved in, I forgot about the rest of the world until it was over. Highly reccomended.

An Odyssey

What made the experience of listening to A Voyage Long and Strange the most enjoyable?

Mr. Mayer did a wonderful job of conveying the story as though he where giving a fireside chat.

What did you like best about this story?

The fact that the author actually tracked down people and places that descended from the story of America and made the whole affair more human than history.

Have you listened to any of John H. Mayer’s other performances before? How does this one compare?

Yes, it's a story of us, not necessarily about us. He shows that memories can be quite long, i.e., the story of the oldest city in America. The present inhabitants are still arguing over it.

Any additional comments?

An excellent addition to anybody's American History reading list.

Unusual, surprising and entertaining!

The author brought many facts of Americas foundation to view that history books often skip over. I would recommend the book to anyone who enjoys American history. Definitely a book of a different color