Old Glory – A Voyage Down the Mississippi –

“As a boy in England, Jonathan Raban read Huckleberry Finn and dreamed of floating down the Mississippi. Thirty years later he did, though Raban made his voyage in a sixteen-foot motorboat instead of on a raft. He started out in Minneapolis and reached the sea near Morgan City, Louisiana, somehow avoiding drowning or getting chewed up by larger craft. And he produced a book that is as vast, and as filled with strong currents and submerged presences, as the river itself.

As brilliant as Raban is at recording the Mississippi’s mercurial caprices, he is even better at observing the people who live along its banks. he chows down at a pig roast, hunts coon, and fishes for walleye; discusses theology in Prairie Du Chien and race relations during a bitter mayoral campaign in Memphis. He locates the discontent of Americans who feel left behind by ’the beautiful people’ and cut off from their past. Witty, elegiac, graceful in its erudition, and unrestrained in its affection, Old Glory is a contemporary classic.”