As a child in England, Raban read "Huckleberry Finn" and dreamed of floating down the Mississippi. "Old Glory" offers the chronicle of this realization of his dream--achieved thirty years later--when he navigated the river, from Minneapolis to Morgan City, Louisiana, in a 16-foot motorboat.
The author of Bad Land realizes a lifelong dream as he navigates the waters of the Mississippi River in a spartan sixteen-foot motorboat, producing yet another masterpiece of contemporary American travel writing. In the course of his voyage, Raban records the mercurial caprices of the river and the astonishingly varied lives of the people who live along its banks. Whether he is fishing for walleye or hunting coon, discussing theology in Prairie Du Chien or race relations in Memphis, he is an expert observer of the heartyland's estrangement from America's capitals ot power and culture, and its helpless nostalgia for its lost past. Witty, elegaic, and magnificently erudite, Old Glory is as filled with strong currents as the Mississippi itself.