Driving Home: An American Journey

About this book

For more than thirty years Jonathan Raban has written with infectious fascination about people and places in transition or on the margins about journeys undertaken and destinations never quite reached and as an Englishman transplanted in Seattle about what it means to feel rooted in America. Spanning two decades Driving Home charts a course through the Pacific Northwest American history and current events as witnessed by a super-sensitive all-seeing eye. Raban spots things we might otherwise miss; he calls up the apt metaphors that transform things into phenomena. He is one of our most gifted observers (Newsday). Stops en route include a Missoula bar a Tea Party convention in Nashville hosted by Sarah Palin the Mississippi in full flood a trip to Hawaii with his daughter a steelhead river in the Cascades and the hidden corners of his adopted hometown Seattle. He deftly explores public and personal spaces poetry and politics geography and catastrophe art and economy and the shifts in various arenas that define our society. Whether the topic is Robert Lowell or Barack Obama or how various painters explorers and homesteaders have engaged with our mythical and actual landscape he has an outsiders eye for the absurd and his tone is intimate never nostalgic and always fresh. Frank witty and provocative Driving Home is part essay collection part diaryand irresistibly insightful about Americas character contradictions and idiosyncrasies.