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 heartland's estrangement from America's capitals of power and culture, and its helpless nostalgia for its lost past. Witty, elegiac, and magnificently erudite, Old Glory is as filled with strong currents as the Mississippi itself.

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He can skewer life in an anecdote and evoke a river scene in a few brushstrokes. -- The Nation Mr. Raban has a keen ear, but for the river itself he has to evince not only a keen eye but a capacity to use a painters palette. He gives us the strong brown god in all its rage, sullenness, and beauty. -- Anthony Burgess Stunning...More successful than ninety nine percent of the books about America since de Tocqueville. -- New York Times Book Review Throughout this epic journey [Raban] struggles to reconcile the real, treacherous, protean river with the shimmering dream-waters of his boyhood. This is what gives his book its remarkable power, elevating it close to the level of myth. -- Salman Rushdie

Author Information

Jonathan Raban is the author of Soft City, Arabia, Old Glory, Foreign Land, For Love and Money, Coasting, and Hunting Mr. Heartbreak. He won the W. H. Heinemann Award for Literature in 1982 and the Thomas Cook Award in 1981 and 1991. He has also edited the Oxford Book of the Sea. He lives in Seattle. James Langton, an Earphones Award-winning narrator, trained as an actor at the Royal Scottish Academy of Music and Drama and later as a musician at the Guildhall School in London. He has worked in radio, film, and television, also appearing in theater in England and on Broadway. He is also a professional musician who led the internationally renowned Pasadena Roof Orchestra from 1996 to 2002.

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