Driving Home
An American Journey
-
- ¥1,500
-
- ¥1,500
発行者による作品情報
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.
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.
