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Old Glory: An American Voyage

Name: Old Glory: An American Voyage
Author: Jonathan Raban
ISBN: 9780060974800

by Jonathan Raban

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Overview

The author of Bad Land realizes a lifelong dream as he navigates the waters of the Mississippi River in a spartan sixteen-foot motorboat, producing yet another masterpiece of contemporary American travel writing. In the course of his voyage, Raban records the mercurial caprices of the river and the astonishingly varied lives of the people who live along its banks. Whether he is fishing for walleye or hunting coon, discussing theology in Prairie Du Chien or race relations in Memphis, he is an expert observer of the heartyland's estrangement from America's capitals ot power and culture, and its helpless nostalgia for its lost past. Witty, elegaic, and magnificently erudite, Old Glory is as filled with strong currents as the Mississippi itself.

About the Author, Jonathan Raban

Jonathan Raban

“The appearance of a new book by Jonathan Raban is a bit like the arrival of an unheralded comet," Michael Thompson-Noel of The Financial Times once observed. "The heavens gently part and suddenly, here in orbit, shimmering with novelty, is a distinguished newcomer from an unimagined world.”

Biography

Jonathan Raban is the author of the novels Surveillance and Waxwings; his nonfiction includes Passage to Juneau and Bad Land. He is the recipient of the National Book Critics Circle Award, the Heinemann Award of the Royal Society of Literature, the PEN/West Creative Nonfiction Award, and the Governor's Award of the State of Washington.

He was born in England and has lived in Seattle, Washington, since 1990.

Author biography courtesy of Random House, Inc.