Understanding Take The Cannoli by Sarah Vowell
Sarah Vowell's "Take The Cannoli" is one of those essays that sounds like it should be simple but actually takes apart American history, violence, and our relationship with both in a way most people don't expect on first read. It appears in her collection Assassination Vacation, which is a strange but effective frame for the whole thing. The essay uses the assassination of President William McKinley as a launching point to talk about something much bigger — specifically, how Americans consume tragedy and the weird cultural artifacts that survive it. McKinley was shot in 1901 by Leon Czolgosz, an anarchist. The bullet missed major organs initially, and for a few days doctors were cautiously optimistic. Then gangrene set in, and he died. Standard story. But Vowell pivots away from the politics of the assassination and zooms in on something almost absurd: the cannoli that Czolgosz was reported to have eaten before shooting the president. There's no solid evidence he actually ate one. Vowell acknowledges this. She's not making a historical claim about pastry consumption. She's using the cannoli as a lens for how we package and digest violent moments. What she's really doing is examining what I'd call tragedy tourism — the American habit of turning historical horror into something consumable, digestible, almost culinary. The cannoli becomes a metaphor for this process. It's sweet, it's associated with Italian-American culture, and it's mundane. That's the whole point. We want our violent history to come wrapped in something normal.
How the Essay Works Structurally
Vowell doesn't just argue a thesis. She moves between three registers: historical narrative, cultural critique, and personal memoir. She talks about McKinley. She talks about Chicago's Italian communities and their relationship to Cannoli Hill. She talks about her own family history — her mother was from New Orleans, her stepfather Paul Fussell was a literary critic who wrote The Class, and she grew up absorbing these different cultural frequencies. The essay works because none of these threads are decorative. They're all load-bearing. I remember first reading this essay in 2012 when it was assigned in a college American Studies course, and my immediate reaction was that it felt impossible to assign because students would either love it or think it was a joke. The cannoli angle makes it sound flippant until you actually sit down and read it straight. Then it hits differently. The humor is real, but it's not the point — the humor is the delivery mechanism for a serious argument about how Americans refuse to sit with grief without converting it into content.
Key Themes and Arguments
There are several layers here worth tracking separately. The commodification of assassination memorabilia. Vowell touches on how quickly objects associated with McKinley's death became collectibles — clothing, photographs, newspaper clippings. This isn't new. Every major American assassination generates this market. But she connects it to a broader pattern where violence becomes a revenue stream and a tourist attraction. The Pan-American Exposition where McKinley was shot was eventually demolished, and the site became a parking lot. That's the American way with trauma — pave over it and sell the memory separately. Class and ethnicity in the cannoli myth. The cannoli connection is specifically tied to Chicago's Little Italy, or Cannoli Hill as it was locally known. This isn't accidental. Czolgosz was the son of Polish immigrants, and the Italian pastry becomes a way of shifting the ethnic blame around in the public imagination. Vowell is sharp about how Italian-Americans absorbed this narrative and made it theirs, even though the actual assassin wasn't Italian. It's a case study in how immigrant communities negotiate belonging through association with American mythology, even when that mythology involves violence.
Get the Full Details
The role of humor in processing historical trauma. Vowell writes with genuine wit. She's not using humor as a deflection — she's using it as a tool for attention. If she wrote this as a straight academic paper, it would be less effective. The laughs make you willing to sit with uncomfortable material longer. This is something I've noticed consistently in her work across Things No One Will Tell You But Me and her Vox media appearances. She understands that audiences will tolerate hard truths if they're dressed in comedy, and she exploits that mechanism deliberately rather than accidentally.
Common Misreadings and Pitfalls
People often come away from this essay thinking it's primarily about McKinley or about cannoli. Both readings are incomplete. The essay is about narrative displacement — the way American culture avoids confronting the raw mechanics of political violence by redirecting attention toward tangential details. The cannoli is interesting because it's real enough to be plausible but false enough to be disposable. That tension is the whole essay. Another common misreading is that Vowell is being disrespectful. She isn't. She's describing a pattern that existed long before she was born and continues unchanged. The difference between her approach and genuine disrespect is intention. She's holding up a mirror to a cultural habit, not participating in it carelessly. I've seen this essay used badly in high school classrooms where the discussion stays at the level of "did McKinley really have cannoli?" The better conversations happen when you push students to ask why that question matters more than any of the actual historical events surrounding the assassination.
Where to Find the Text
Take The Cannoli Sarah Vowell is available in the print collection Assassination Vacation (Simon & Schuster, 2005). It was originally published in The New Republic in 2001. You can also find it in various educational anthologies and sometimes as an excerpt in magazines and online literary journals. If you're teaching it or studying it, the print version gives you the full context of the surrounding essays, which materially changes how you read it. Reading "Take The Cannoli" after "Lincoln in the Searcy" or alongside "Blues for a Senator" frames the argument completely differently. There are also authorized PDF versions circulating through academic course reserves and some public domain repositories, but those tend to be incomplete or missing the original pagination that matters for citation purposes. If you need the full text for research, the book is worth the purchase price.
Why This Essay Still Matters
The cannoli metaphor has only gotten sharper since 2001. We've moved from television coverage of assassinations to 24-hour cable cycles to social media ecosystems where every violent event is immediately repackaged into memes, merchandise, and content. Vowell was describing something in 2001 that has since accelerented into something almost unrecognizable. The essay functions as a baseline measurement for how far American cultural consumption of trauma has traveled in twenty-five years. There's also a quieter thread about authorship and credit. Vowell spent years developing a distinctive voice that critics sometimes dismissed as "just funny" or "lightweight." This essay, among others in the collection, demonstrates that the lightness is structural. The essay is doing rigorous cultural analysis while making you laugh at a pastry. That's a harder trick to pull off than straight academic writing, and it deserves recognition for that reason alone. I've encountered too many syllabus committees that skip Vowell because they assume her work doesn't meet a certain seriousness threshold. That's a mistake. The seriousness is there. It's just wearing a disguise.
