Showing results for "jonathan raban"

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Jonathan Raban

Driving Home is a collection of Jonathan Raban's travel writing and essays, spanning two decades and charting its course through American history and world events.Jonathan Raban has written about people and places in transition or on the margins, of journeys undertaken and destinations never quite reached; of isolation and alienation, but also of what it means to belong, to feel rooted.He writes with an outsider’s eye for the public and the persona...

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Jonathan Raban

Coasting round Britain single-handed in an antique two-masted sailing boat, Jonathan Raban conducts a masterly exploration of England and the English at the time of Margaret Thatcher and the Falklands War. He moves seamlessly between awkward memories of childhood as the son of a vicar, a vivid chronicle of the shape-shifting sea and incisive descriptions of the people and communities he encounters.As he faces his terror of racing water, eddies, offshore sandbars and ferries on a co...

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Jonathan Raban

Navigating the Mississippi River from Minneapolis to New Orleans, Jonathan Raban opens himself to experience the river in all her turbulent and unpredictable old glory. Going wherever the current takes him, he joins a coon-hunt in Savana, falls for a girl in St Louis, worships with black Baptists in Memphis and hangs out with the housewives of Pemiscot and the hog-king of Dubuque. Through tears of laughter, we are led into the heartland of America – with its hunger and hospitality, its inv...

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Jonathan Raban

Following in the footsteps of countless emigrants, Jonathan Raban takes ship for New York from Liverpool, to explore how succeeding generations of newcomers have fared in America. He finds a country of massive contrasts, between the 'Street People' and the 'Air People' in New York, between small town and big city, between thrusting immigrants and down-at-heel Native Americans.Having outgrown his minute, rented, New York apartment, he heads for Guntersville, Alabama, where he settle...

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Jonathan Raban

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Vintage Departures

NATIONAL BESTSELLER • NATIONAL BOOK CRITICS CIRCLE AWARD WINNER • Startlingly observed, beautifully written, this book is a contemporary classic of the American West. • "As good a book as I have read about rural America in a very long time." —The New York Times Book ReviewIn 1909 maps still identified eastern Montana as the Great American Desert. But in that year Congress, lobbied heavily by railroad companies, offered 320-acre tracts of land to anyone bol...

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Jonathan Raban

Intrigued by the Arabs, dressed in floor-length robes and yashmaks, who began holidaying in London after the 1970s oil boom, Raban wanted to discover the reality of their home lives and world view. His quest took him through Bahrain, Qatar, Abu Dhabi, Yemen, Egypt and Jordan. What he discovered was a far cry from the camel, tent and sand-dune archetypes of early European explorers. Oil wealth had seeped into almost every corner, and Bedouin encampments had been replaced by cosmopolitan boo...

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Jonathan Raban

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Vintage Departures

**The bestselling, award-winning author of Bad Land realizes a lifelong dream as he navigates the waters of the Mississippi River in a sixteen-foot motorboat, producing yet another masterpiece of contemporary American travel writing."Stunning." —The New York Times Book Review**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 wa...

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Jonathan Raban, Albino Ochero-Okello

A collection of travel writing by some of the genre's finest authors, from Paul Theroux to Sara Wheeler, voyaging from Mississippi to Malawi and Thailand.The New Granta Book of Travel Writing represents a sea change in writers' approaches to the craft. The 1980s were the culmination of a golden age, when writers including Bruce Chatwin, James Hamilton-Paterson and James Fenton set out to document life in largely unfamiliar territory, bringing back tales of...

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Jonathan Raban

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Vintage Departures

From the national bestselling, National Book Critics Circle Award-winning author of Bad Land comes “a lively, intensely personal recounting of a voyage into a gifted writer's country and self” (The New York Times Book Review).Put Jonathan Raban on a boat and the results will be fascinating, and never more so than when he’s sailing around the serpentine, 2,000-mile coast of his native England. In this acutely perceived and beautifully written book,...

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Jonathan Raban

An entrancing travelogue from celebrated writer, Jonathan Raban.First published in 1999, Passage to Juneau is an account of Raban's personal journey from Seattle to the Alaskan Capital by boat through the meandering sea route, the Inside Passage, told in parallel to the same voyage taken by Captain George Vancouver in the late eighteenth century.Described by Ian McEwan as 'Raban at his best', this is extraordinary travel writing, told from two very...

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Jonathan Raban

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Vintage Departures

**The bestselling, award-winning author of Bad Land takes us along the Inside Passage, 1,000 miles of often treacherous water, which he navigates solo in a 35-foot sailboat, offering captivating discourses on art, philosophy, and navigation and an unsparing narrative of personal loss."A work of great beauty and inexhaustible fervor." —The Washington Post Book World**With the same rigorous observation (natural and social), invigorating stylishness, and ency...

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Jonathan Raban

This collection of writing, undertaken for love and for money, is largely about books, writers and travel. It is an engrossing and candid exploration of what it means to make a living from words. Jonathan Raban weighs up the advantages of maintaining an independent spirit against problems of insolvency and self-worth, confesses to travel as an escape from the blank page, ponders the true art of the book review, admires the role of the literary editor and remembers with affection and hilari...