Get Access Passage To Juneau: A Sea And Its Meanings Written And Illustrated By Jonathan Raban Accessible Through Document

purchased this book used in paperback form reading at a liesurely pace soon turned laborious and tookweeks to complete the book, some days remaining on the night stand because I hadn't the will to resume reading it.
Raban has a million dollar vocabulary and turns many Jonathan Raban is, for my money, among the best of our contemporary travel writers, standing shoulder to shoulder with Paul Theroux and Bill Bryson, and Passage to Juneau only reinforces that opinion.
I first read this book in, when it was published, because I was As a northwesterner, a term my spellchecker has to be extorted into producing, I find this a fitting elegy for the place, actually an elegy for the "place of Place" in English literature, in the heart and mind.
Sad, but purging one of Aristotelian pity and terror, it Raban weaves together several parallel life passages while sailing from Seattle to Alaska: his own solo voyage, long past explorers of the Pacific Northwest, his father's death, and the barely noticed unraveling of his marriage.
Some dangers lurk forever deep underwater Let me see if I can write a review that does justice to this book and at the same time explain to myself why it is such a great piece of literature.
I think the first point to make is that the writing mirrors the, by turns, eddying, chaotic, reflective quality This is THE book to read if you plan to spend time on the waters around Seattle, Vancouver, the San Juans and the Inside Passage.
The author shares his sailing experiences and, if you pay attention and you are a sailor, you will not have to experience a tragedy involving I am not sure the author should have been the reader for the audible version of this book.
He has a very upper crusty British accent which comes across as unfriendly which may truly be the way he is because he has some weird, not so nice, and not at all accurate opinions I tend to ignore author Raban's political diatribes most of his writing, unfortunately and revel in the beauty of his books about his personal boat journeys.
I had earlier read "Old Glory: A Voyage Down The Mississippi" and felt that it lost focus about

halfway through Raban is searching and compassionate And he is at all times eloquent.

Richard Ford

Following the overland triumph of Bad Land whose prizes included the National Book Critics Circle Award Jonathan Raban goes to sea,

The Inside Passage from Puget Sound to Alaska is winding, turbulent, and deep an ancient, thousand mile long sea route, rich in dangerous whirlpools, eddies, rips, and races.
Here flourished the canoe culture of the Northwest Indians, with their fantastic painted masks and complex iconography and their stories of malign submarine gods and monsters, The unhappy British ship Discovery, captained by George Vancouver, came through these open reaches and narrow chasms in, The early explorers were quickly followed by fur traders, settlers, missionaries, anthropologists, fishermen, and tourists, each with their own designs on this intricate and haunted sea,

When Jonathan Raban set out alone in his own boat to sail from his Seattle home to the Alaskan Panhandle, he wanted to decode the many riddles and meanings of the sea: in Indian art and mythology, in the journals of Vancouver and his officers and midshipmen, in poetry and painting, in the physics of waves and turbulence.
His voyage began as an intellectual adventure, but he soon found himself in deeper, ominously personal waters than he had planned,
In this seaborne epic, Raban brings the past spectacularly alive and renders the present in a prose of sustained brilliance and humor, Exhilarating, panoramic, full of ideas, natural history, and mordant social observation, his journey into the wild heart of North America turns into a profound exploration of the wilderness of the human heart.
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