Driving Home: An American Journey [Hardcover]

Author by Raban, Jonathan

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Editorial Reviews

Originally published: London: Picador, 2010.

From Publisher

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 outsider's 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 diary--and irresistibly insightful about America's character, contradictions, and idiosyncrasies.

Reviews

From Booklist: Literary success mandates collecting an author's best. This volume picks from Raban's past two decades of production. Born in Britain but living in Seattle since 1990, Raban writes in a variety of genres, all of which are represented here: introductions to sailing classics, travel reportage, literary criticism, the personal essay, and political commentary. In all but the last, he stands detached from cant and superficiality, which is perhaps prerequisite for the striking originalities and aperus with which he leavens every article. Unfortunately, his political preoccupations jarringly clash with the exploratory aesthetics of this anthology, which would have been better had he saved his politics for the sequel to My Holy War (2005), his prior political assemblage. Otherwise, this book functions excellently as a smorgasbord. Sampling some of everything, readers may gladly follow Raban for layers beneath the surfaces of his subjects, becoming immersed in such matters as the history of landscapes (especially those of Washington and Montana), the perils and pleasures of sailing, and assessments of authors (Raban's book reviews are outstanding exercises in the genre). At its best, a delight for literary-minded readers. HIGH-DEMAND BACKSTORY: Provocative, multi-award-winning author Jonathan Raban offers a collection of essays that will receive national media and review attention.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2011, American Library Association.)
From Publishers Weekly: With his characteristic curiosity and his insatiable desire to drink as deeply as he can from the wells of landscape or literature, Raban (Passage to Juneau) once again vividly captures the experience of trying to make a home in a place that he continues to find fascinating, bizarre, ugly, beautiful, repellent, and generous. Raban moved to Seattle from London in 1990, imagining that the life of writing could easily be transported in an age of instant communication, and because he met someone. In this diverse collection of dispatches from life in a new land, Raban ranges widely over the territory into which he has alighted, exploring the turbulence of waves as he sails the Pacific coast, the vagaries of American politics, the destructive ravages of natural disasters such as the Mississippi floods of 1992, and the difficulty of going home again. Drawing on two then new books on the mid-20th-century photographer Dorothea Lange, for example, Raban adroitly observes that "across the rural West the Great Depression is less a historical event than a permanent condition... the warning in the rearview mirror applies here: the lives in Lange's photographs for the FSA are closer than they appear." In one of the collection's most charming pieces, "Why Travel?" he ruminates about the ways to turn travel into adventure: "The good traveler is an inveterate snoop... worming your way into the skin of a true denizen, you begin to see the landscape itself as a real place and not just as a the pretty backdrop to your own holiday." Like a stalwart travel guide, Raban points out the charming as well as the peculiar details of America's cultural, political, and physical landscape. (Sept.) Copyright 2011 Reed Business Information.

Quote Reviews

"A collection of essays about America and Americana . . . full of ideas that move through the language with the grace of a well-captained sailboat . . . Throughout, Raban reveals the traits that have long endeared him to his readers: a curiosity about the quirkiness of people and places, a ferocious love for the land, an elegance (but never pretentiousness) of style, self-deprecation, and an unusual ability to inhabit the imaginations of his interlocutors."
"--Kirkus Reviews
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"A delight . . . [Raban] stands detached from cant and superficiality, which is perhaps a prerequisite for the striking originalities and apercus with which he leavens every article."
"--Booklist
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"It takes a passionate history buff to note how many of America's virtues and vices have been present since independence and before, and a skilled raconteur to make us feel that passion."
"--The Sunday Times"
"Teems with acerbic humor, but it contains, too, a wealth of astute cultural an
"Raban [here] showcases his craftsmanship as a writer and his bona fides as an intellectual. Every word is impeccably chosen, every metaphor meticulously selected.... [His] virtues are a writer are virtually unrivaled when it comes to explaining our relationships with landscapes and nature, and he's unrivaled, period, when describing water in all its forms, be it a placid puddle or a storm-swirled sea." --Phil Campbell, "Columbia Journalism Review"
""Driving Home "could easily have been titled "The Jonathan Raban Reader," as the brisk, smartly crafted pieces are just that representative of [his] long and illustrative writing life....By combining them in one volume, Raban offers a lively stew of topics, themes that most interest the British citizen turned Seattleite, subjects that get him the most excited and riled....Readers have long been drawn to Raban for the elegance of his language and the eloquence of his thought and can expect to find the same in these essays." --Deboraha
"The central work of Raban's life might be described as an effort to determine what America is like ... But along with that, the reader notes, big water draws from Raban a kind of genius for natural description." --Thomas Powers, "The New York Review of Books"
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"The Northwest should feel itself lucky to have found a writer as fabulous--filled to overflowing with stories, meaning, and insight--as the landscape itself demands ... It has been one of the great pleasures of the past twenty years to watch Raban discover this landscape for himself ... to see [it] and its people with a clarify unmatched by most natives." --Charles Petersen, "Barnes and Noble" review
"Raban [here] showcases his craftsmanship as a writer and his bona fides as an intellectual. Every word is impeccably chosen, every metaphor meticulously selected.... [His] virtues are a writer are virtually unrivaled when it comes to explaining our relationships with landscapes and nature, and he's unrivaled, perio
"Throughout ["Driving Home"], Raban reveals the traits that have long endeared him to his readers--a curiosity about the quirkiness of people and places, a ferocious love for the land, an elegance (but never pretentiousness) of style, self-deprecation and an unusual ability to inhabit the imaginations of his interlocutors . . . Full of ideas that move through the language with the grace of a well-captained sailboat." --"Kirkus Reviews"
"Raban stands detached from cant and superficiality, which is perhaps prerequisite for the striking originalities and apercus with which he leavens ["Driving Home," which] functions excellently as a smorgasbord. Sampling some of everything, readers may gladly follow Raban for layers beneath the surfaces of his subjects, becoming immersed in such matters as the history of landscapes, the perils and pleasures of sailing, and assessments of authors (Raban's book reviews are outstanding exercises in the genre) . . . A delight." --Gilbert Taylor, "Boo
"This Englishman in America is weird, unfettered, scruffy and alive....Mr. Raban's best writing, which is most of it, is succulent under a crusty exterior, like a fish baked in salt. His stuff is yet more proof that Britons are better travel writers and essayists than Americans: drier, funnier, more argumentative."
--Dwight Garner, "The New York Times"
"Raban knows that the best essayist trusts in drift and digression and habitually adds a literary trill. He is an erudite but adaptable companion, tart and genial, promiscuous in experience yet reliable in temperament....He conjures with his new home, with the Pacific Northwest, with history, poetry, geography, catastrophe...subjects Raban circumnavigates with finesse, shrugging off the obvious and regularly landing us on a shore we can't quite glimpse from here."
--Stacy Schiff, "The New York Times Book Review"
"A collection of essays about America and Americana . . . full of ideas that move through the language w