Coasting (Picador Travel Classics) - Hardcover

Jonathan Raban

3.98

526 ratings by Goodreads

9780330343954: Coasting (Picador Travel Classics)

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0330343955 ISBN 13: 9780330343954

Publisher: Pan Macmillan, 1995

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In 1982, Jonathan Raban set sail on a voyage around his native land. He furnished a small boat with books and pictures and took to the sea, making a looping journey around the British Isles.

The voyage took him deep into history, his own and his country's and put him in touch with unfashionable figures out of his past...Hillaire Belloc, for example who wrote THE CRUISE OF THE NONA in 1925 about his own adventures at sea. Raban is at his best in these encounters, and they cut across all classes...poets, priests, bums, politicians, tourists.

"It is the surrounding sea and all its moods that haunts the pages of COASTING. Raban, is a latterday Pilgrim on a modern Progress, and his voyage of discovery is one in which a man comes to terms with his life and with the larger meaning of home." (B-O-T Editorial Review Board)

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From the Publisher:

8 1.5-hour cassettes

From the Inside Flap:

Put Jonathan Raban on a boat and the results will be fascinating, and never more so than when he's sailing around the serpentine, 2,000-mile coast of his native England. In this acutely perceived and beautifully written book, the bestselling author of Bad Land turns that voyage-which coincided with the Falklands war of 1982-into an occasion for meditations on his country, his childhood, and the elusive notion of home.
Whether he's chatting with bored tax exiles on the Isle of Man, wrestling down a mainsail during a titanic gale, or crashing a Scottish house party where the kilted guests turn out to be Americans, Raban is alert to the slightest nuance of meaning. One can read Coasting for his precise naturalistic descriptions or his mordant comments on the new England, where the principal industry seems to be the marketing of Englishness. But one always reads it with pleasure.

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