Passage to Juneau: A Sea and Its Meanings [B0015]

1999 HCDJ in nice clean condition. "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. 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, more 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.

From recent-ish Amazon/GoodReads reviews: "Fantastic. This book is difficult to define: part biography, sailing adventure, historical and literature essay, ... I just loved all of it."; "Raban skillfully flows from the historical to the geographic to the interpersonal, including enough twists and turns to justify the heft of this book. For anyone interested in British Columbia, the Alaskan Panhandle, or crying, this one will keep you reading long into the stormy night."; "I enjoyed the writing style of this book and found that his ability to jump between his own experience travelling and the history of Captain Vancouver’s travels through the same waters to be informative. His perspective on the coastal indigenous population then and now was also insightful. His personal struggles at the time of his travels were also well communicated and meaningful. I enjoyed reading this book and took extra pleasure while reading it while travelling and vacationing on the Gulf Islands and Vancouver Island."