Driving Home: An American Journey

· Sold by Pantheon
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544
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About this ebook

Spanning two decades, this frank, witty, and provocative volume—part essay collection, part diary—charts a course through the Pacific Northwest, American history, and current events as witnessed by “one of our most gifted observers” (Newsday).

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.  

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 outsider’s eye for the absurd, and his tone is intimate, never nostalgic, and always fresh.

Driving Home is irresistibly insightful about America’s character, contradictions, and idiosyncrasies.
Spanning two decades, this frank, witty, and provocative volume—part essay collection, part diary—charts a course through the Pacific Northwest, American history, and current events as witnessed by “one of our most gifted observers” (Newsday). For more than thirty years, Jonathan Raban has writt...

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About the author

JONATHAN RABAN is the author of the novels Surveillance and Waxwings; his nonfiction works include Passage to Juneau, Bad Land, and Driving Home. His honors include the National Book Critics Circle Award, the PEN/West Creative Nonfiction Award, the Pacific Northwest Booksellers’ Award, and the Governor’s Award of the State of Washington. He died in 2023.
JONATHAN RABAN is the author of the novels Surveillance and Waxwings; his nonfiction works include Passage to Juneau, Bad Land, and Driving Home. His honors include the National Book Critics Circle Award, the PEN/West Creative Nonfiction Award, the Pacific Northwest Booksellers’ Award, and the Go...

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