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

1999 HCDJ 1st edition- "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 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."