Synopses & Reviews
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 expat, 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. Proving that an outsider is the keenest observer of the scene that natives take for granted, this collection of Jonathan Raban’s essays affirms his place as the most literate, perceptive, and humorous commentator on the places, characters, and obsessions that constitute the American scene. 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).
Review
“It was EB White who said: ‘An Englishman is not happy until he has explained America.’ Jonathan Raban ought to be very happy on this score, because his Driving Home explains the State of the Union, and Raban continues to be the most resourceful refugee on our shores.” Paul Theroux, The Guardian (UK)
Review
“With his characteristic curiosity and his insatiable desire to drink as deeply as he can from the wells of landscape or literature, Raban 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.” Publishers Weekly
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“Full of ideas that move through the language with the grace of a well-captained sailboat.” Kirkus Reviews
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“Raban knows 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.” The New York Times Book Review
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“Raban writes with characteristic ease and insight…[describing], among other things, his attempts to get to know his adopted home and its warring tribes.” The New Yorker
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“Raban is at his best when treating the people, landscapes and cultures through which he is passing as if they were works of art: holding up absurdities to patient inspection, digging into their histories, forcing the complacent and skeptical to acknowledge hidden beauties….Phrase-making wit is much in evidence through these pages, and there is something refreshing about a first-rate writer whose stories are literate and sophisticated but never self-consciously ‘literary.’…He knows how to capture the truth of a thing without saying it.” The Wall Street Journal
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"Funny, acerbic, and deeply astute." The Boston Globe
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"This Englishman in America is weird, unfettered, scruffy, 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." The New York Times
Review
“Jonathan Raban writes about water in the way that Barry Lopez writes about snow or Wilfred Thesiger wrote about sand: it's not always in the foreground of his observation, but you can sense his natural element in his whole way of seeing.…[Driving Home] is also an autobiography of sorts, a memoir of the years since Raban cast himself adrift from Britain and washed up in Seattle.” The Guardian (UK)
About the Author
Jonathan Raban is the author, most recently, of the novels Surveillance and Waxwings; his nonfiction includes Passage to Juneau and Bad Land. His honors include the National Book Critics Circle Award, the PEN/West Creative Nonfiction Award, the Pacific Northwest Booksellers' Award, and the Governor's Award of the State of Washington. He lives in Seattle.