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Driving Home: An American Journey (2000)

by Jonathan Raban(Favorite Author)

3.37 of 5 Votes: 4

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English

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review 1: From Raban’s Driving Home“Past Golgotha Butte, the windsurfers begin. The Columbia Gorge gathers in the westerly winds of the Pacific and focuses them like a nozzle. It is one of the great wind funnels of the world, and its effect is exaggerated because the sun-dried desert land east of the Cascades forms a pressure vacuum that sucks in the cool wet oceanic air. So an almost continuously westerly gale blows through the lower Columbia valley, burnishing the rock bluffs and keeping the sagebrush down to a thin and close-cropped fur.”“Great tracts of the Pacific Northwest, like this one, resembled the interior landscape of manic depression. They ran through the same exhausting cycle. For days on end there’d be gloom and dripping water in this natural dungeon whe... morere things grew like some fungal runaway mold. Then, without warning, the sky would clear and you’d find yourself suddenly open to the high white heights, and watch as the world changed color in an instant …this mood-swing country …“In the region around Desolation Sound, the tide is so irregular that the compilers of modern tidal atlases leave the area blank, except for asterisks warning the mariner to expect capricious currents here. On Tuesday the ebb tide will run south to the Pacific by way of Georgia Strait; on Wednesday, it may elect to run north, finding the open sea via the Sechelt Rapids and Charlotte Strait. Vancouver commented. ‘in the course of some days there would not be the least perceptible stream; and in others a very rapid one, that generally continued in the same direction twenty four hours, and sometimes longer. The time of high water was equally vague and undefinable’”
review 2: English-born, Raban moved to the US in the 70s, and has lived here and written about it ever since. His essays deal with the ambiguous nature of his understanding of our culture. They are uneven, ranging from OK to wonderful, but they echo his really great books ("Badlands" and "Hunting for Mister Heartbreak," say). His writing is worth attention. (His essay on Shackelton and Robert Scott, tucked away toward the end, could merit a whole book.) less

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