Passage to Juneau

Author: Jonathan Raban
Publisher: Vintage
ISBN: 0307797260
Category : Travel
Languages : en
Pages : 446

Book Description
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 encyclopedic learning that he brought to his National Book Award-winning Bad Land, Jonathan Raban conducts readers along the Inside Passage from Seattle to Juneau. But Passage to Juneau also traverses a gulf of centuries and cultures: the immeasurable divide between the Northwest's Indians and its first European explorers—between its embattled fishermen and loggers and its pampered new class.

Coasting

Author: Jonathan Raban
Publisher: Vintage
ISBN: 0307517713
Category : Travel
Languages : en
Pages : 363

Book Description
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, the bestselling author of Bad Land turns that voyage–which coincided with the Falklands war of 1982-into an occasion for meditations on his country, his childhood, and the elusive notion of home. Whether he’s chatting with bored tax exiles on the Isle of Man, wrestling down a mainsail during a titanic gale, or crashing a Scottish house party where the kilted guests turn out to be Americans, Raban is alert to the slightest nuance of meaning. One can read Coasting for his precise naturalistic descriptions or his mordant comments on the new England, where the principal industry seems to be the marketing of Englishness. But one always reads it with pleasure.

Alaska's Southeast

Author: Mike Miller
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
ISBN: 0762752017
Category : Travel
Languages : en
Pages : 305

Book Description
Discover the rich landscape and scenic beauty of Alaska's Inside Passage, including Skagway, Haines, Juneau, Sitka, Petersburg, Wrangell, and Ketchikan. Alaska's Southeast details the region's history, culture, geography, and flora and fauna. It also provides extensive information on when to go, what to bring, how to get there and how to get around, where to eat, and where to stay. With more than 10 million acres of forest, 1,000 islands, 10,000 miles of shoreline, 50 to 70 major glaciers, and thousands of brown bears and eagles, Alaska's Southeast offers much to be explored.

In Darkest Alaska

Author: Robert Campbell
Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press
ISBN: 0812201523
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 357

Book Description
Before Alaska became a mining bonanza, it was a scenic bonanza, a place larger in the American imagination than in its actual borders. Prior to the great Klondike Gold Rush of 1897, thousands of scenic adventurers journeyed along the Inside Passage, the nearly thousand-mile sea-lane that snakes up the Pacific coast from Puget Sound to Icy Strait. Both the famous—including wilderness advocate John Muir, landscape painter Albert Bierstadt, and photographers Eadweard Muybridge and Edward Curtis—and the long forgotten—a gay ex-sailor, a former society reporter, an African explorer, and a neurasthenic Methodist minister—returned with fascinating accounts of their Alaskan journeys, becoming advance men and women for an expanding United States. In Darkest Alaska explores the popular images conjured by these travelers' tales, as well as their influence on the broader society. Drawing on lively firsthand accounts, archival photographs, maps, and other ephemera of the day, historian Robert Campbell chronicles how Gilded Age sightseers were inspired by Alaska's bounty of evolutionary treasures, tribal artifacts, geological riches, and novel thrills to produce a wealth of highly imaginative reportage about the territory. By portraying the territory as a "Last West" ripe for American conquest, tourists helped pave the way for settlement and exploitation.

Driving Home

Author: Jonathan Raban
Publisher: Pantheon
ISBN: 0307379914
Category : Authors, English
Languages : en
Pages : 513

Book Description
Originally published: London: Picador, 2010.

Old Glory

Author: Jonathan Raban
Publisher:
ISBN: 9781780601366
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 420

Book Description
'Jonathan Raban is one of the world's greatest living travel writers.' William Dalrymple 'The best book of travel ever written by an Englishman about the United States' Jan Morris, Independent Navigating the Mississippi River from Minneapolis to New Orleans, 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, 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 inventive energy and its charming lethargy - and come to know something of its soul. The journey is as much the story of Raban as it is of the Mississippi. Navigating the dangerous, ever-changing waters in an unsuitably fragile aluminium skiff, he immerses himself with an irresistible emotional intensity as he tries to give shape to the river and the story - finding himself by turns vulnerable, curious, angry and, like all of us, sometimes foolishly in love.

Inside Passage

Author: Michael Modzelewski
Publisher: Boynton Beach, Fla. : Adventures Unlimited
ISBN: 9780966062502
Category : Nature
Languages : en
Pages : 220

Book Description
Where the sky is his ceiling and the mountains his walls, Michael Modzelewski describes his adventures as he forms unusual friendships with passing yachters, salmon fishermen, Kwakiutl Indians, loners and the owner of the house he is staying at, Will Malloff, a man of oversized personality-a healer, builder, woodsman, and thinker. Modzelewski writes with a love for nature and gentle humor about his interactions with the native animals (eagles, whales wolves), as well as local animals(cats, dogs, "tame" wild boars), and other settlers.

Hunting Mister Heartbreak

Author: Jonathan Raban
Publisher: Vintage
ISBN: 0307791637
Category : Travel
Languages : en
Pages : 469

Book Description
NEW YORK TIMES NOTABLE BOOK • An exhilarating, often deliciously funny and "beautifully written voyage of discovery" (Chicago Tribune) that is at once a travelogue, a social history, and a love letter to America. • From the bestselling, award-winning author of Bad Land In 1782 an immigrant with the high-toned name J. Hector St. John de Crèvecoeur—"Heartbreak" in English—wrote a pioneering account of one European's transformation into an American. Some two hundred years later Jonathan Raban, winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award, arrived in Crèvecoeur's wake to see how America has paid off for succeeding generations of newcomers. In the course of Hunting Mr. Heartbreak, Raban passes for homeless in New York and tries to pass for a good ol' boy in Alabama (which entails "renting" an elderly black lab). He sees the Protestant work ethic perfected by Korean immigrants in Seattle—one of whom celebrates her new home as "So big! So green! So wide-wide-wide!"—and repudiated by the lowlife of Key West. And on every page of this peerlessly observant work, Raban makes us experience America with wonder, humor, and an unblinking eye for its contradictions.

Travels in Alaska

Author: John Muir
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
ISBN: 0547561679
Category : Nature
Languages : en
Pages : 371

Book Description
This book describes Alaska in the late nineteenth century and Muir's early adventures in an untamed land of glaciers and northern lights.

Soft City

Author: Jonathan Raban
Publisher: Picador
ISBN: 1760557439
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 271

Book Description
With an introduction by Iain Sinclair In the city we can live deliberately: inventing and renewing ourselves, carving out journeys, creating private spaces. But in the city we are also afraid of being alone, clinging to the structures of daily life to ward off the chaos around us. How is it that the noisy, jostling, overwhelming metropolis leaves us at once so energized and so fragile? In Soft City, Jonathan Raban, one of our most acclaimed novelists and travel writers seeks to find out. First published in the 1970s, his account is a compelling exploration of urban life: a classic in the literature of the city, more relevant to today’s overcrowded planet than ever.