{"product_id":"passage-to-juneau-by-jonathan-raban-3692z","title":"Passage To Juneau by Jonathan Raban","description":"\u003cp\u003eAn entrancing travelogue from celebrated writer Jonathan Raban.  First published in 1999, Passage to Juneau is an account of Raban's personal journey from Seattle to the Alaskan Capital by boat through the meandering sea route, the Inside Passage, told in parallel to the same voyage taken by Captain George Vancouver in the late eighteenth century.  Described by Ian McEwan as 'Raban at his best', this is extraordinary travel writing, told from two very different perspectives. A book about the idea of loss, Raban is home but still, he is very much still at sea.  Amazon Review Jonathan Raban's Passage to Juneau is a pure delight, even for the most dedicated landlubbers. On April Fool's Day 1993, Raban set sail in his 35-foot ketch from virtual reality Seattle, to travel the 1,000 or so miles up the often turbulent and tricky Inside Passage to Alaska. Despite describing himself as a timid, weedy, cerebral type, never more out of my element than when I'm at sea, he nevertheless meant to go fishing for reflections and come back with a glittering haul. And glittering this is, for Raban writes with such vivid acuity and witty iconoclasm about charted and uncharted waters, actual, historical, anthropological, natural and personal--and much else besides. His constants as he threads his course through the fretwork of islands, narrows and passes are tracing Captain Vancouver's 1792 voyage in the Discovery; the Northwest Indians' tenacious relation to the sea that dominated their lives and was mirrored in their art; Edmund Burke's 1757 theory of the sublime (terror was the most necessary ingredient) and the consequent, ecstatic recording of the coastal landscape (not by Vancouver, who found it dull and gloomy, but by his snobbish young upper-class officers); Raban's father's death and its aftermath which interrupted his voyage; and, of course, the sea itself with its six basic movements: pitch, roll, yaw, heave, surge and sway.  Every page offers rewarding observations and colourful commentary: on the death of the great fisheries, the new tourism, a rereading of Shelley and Marcus Aurelius, bird flight, the rigours of outpost life and even indeed the origins of nookie. All of this makes for an utterly engaging, generously questing, scholarly and richly pleasurable work. --Ruth Petrie   About the Author  Jonathan Raban was the author of over a dozen books, both fiction and non-fiction, including Passage to Juneau, Bad Land, Hunting Mister Heartbreak, Coasting, Old Glory, Arabia, Soft City, Waxwings and Surveillance.  Over the span of six decades, he won the National Book Critics Circle Award, the Royal Society of Literature's Heinemann Award, the Thomas Cook Award, the PEN West Creative Nonfiction Award, the Pacific Northwest Booksellers' Award, and the Governor's Award of the State of Washington. His work appeared in The New Yorker, Granta, Harpers, The New York Review of Books, Outside, Atlantic Monthly, New Republic, The London Review of Books, and other magazines.  In 1990 Raban, a British citizen, moved from London to Seattle, where he lived with his daughter until his death in 2023. \u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"Book Express","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":41844296417354,"sku":"3692z","price":8.0,"currency_code":"NZD","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0618\/9101\/8826\/files\/3692z_073ad361-5d4d-45e1-9484-5e58429d3555.jpg?v=1765837948","url":"https:\/\/www.bookexpress.nz\/products\/passage-to-juneau-by-jonathan-raban-3692z","provider":"Book Express","version":"1.0","type":"link"}