Customer Reviews

Old Glory : A Voyage Down the Mississippi

5 star:		(12)
4 star:		(2)
3 star:		(2)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(3)

 

 

Old Glory tells the tale of Raban's solo journey by boat down the Mississippi from Minneapolis to New Orleans. Along the way, he visits the great cities and backwater towns that dot this legendary American wonder. Raban demonstrates that the Mississippi is, in myriad ways, much more than a river. He records the life-altering relationships between people and place and brings us the history and experience of this ultimate American artery. I have crossed the Mississippi by bridge and plane countless times and, with a cursory glance, acknowledged it as a major American marker. Raban, however, brings a soul to the Mississippi that, at once, uncovers a latent reverence, inspires a profound understanding, and rekindles a vicarious sense of spirit and adventure in the American citizen for "our" river and it's lore. This is an excellent book that deserves, and will certainly earn, your attention.

I read Bad Land, Raban's book on homesteaders in Montana several years ago and it has become one of my all time favorite books. Since that time I have read some of Raban's other books, this one included. Raban's subject is fascinating, his writing is first rate. However, like some of the other reviewers have noted, this book is marred by the author's cynical tone and approach and an air of condecension that preveals throughout this book. Raban continually gives the impression that in his brief stops along the river he "figures out" what the locals have been unable to or have failed to figure out for years. I am sure that Raban did encounter his share of rubes and rednecks, but if this book is to be believed, those types of people are practically the only ones he encountered (maybe this has something to do with the fact that he sought out bars and watering holes as his first contact with many of the places he visited). His take on the South is typical of someone who has never lived in it.

This is a very good book and worth reading. However, it would not be my first choice of books written by this author. This book is marred by an attitude of superiority and condecension that Raban appears to have lost in his later books.

I have traveled a fair amount through the small towns of the United States and have to concur with Mr. Raban's depiction of both the towns and the people who live in them. Other readers who have taken the time to write reviews of this book here seem to have remembered only about half of what Raban wrote about each of the towns that he visited.

His initial impressions were often filled with disappointment. He had approached this trip with a boyhood dream in his head and he was continually set back on his proverbial heels by the reality of these river towns in 1979. More often than not, however, further exploration of the town, conversations with some of its citizens and reflection on his part, caused Raban to revise his evaluation of many of the places that he visited.

Some reviewers may perhaps have forgotten that this book describes this region as it was after years during which the US economy struggled through an oil crisis, bouts of inflation, intervals of high unemployment and the tail end of the history of the "old economy". Should someone have the time and inclination to retrace Raban's steps nearly 25 years later, I would not be surprised if they found these towns and their people had changed quite a bit, probably for the better in social and economic terms. For instance, Raban devoted most of a chapter to the failed election campaign of Memphis's first black candidate for mayor. A quick Google (keywords: Memphis Tennesee government) will show you that the present mayor of Memphis (Willie W. Herenton) is African-American. I'm going to guess that he is not the first black mayor of Memphis.

I loved Raban's modus operandi for getting to the heart of a place. Tie up your boat, go to the nearest bar and strike up a conversation. This would seem to me to be the most reliable means to quickly get an unvarnished opinion about a place. Sure, someone on a bar stool is likely to have a slightly dimmer view of the place where he or she lives than the average citizen, but Raban was rarely, if ever, content with their views. He basically used the tavern-sitters as a 1979-era local flesh-and-blood Google; he found out the basics about a place like who are the local characters, what are the main industries, which are the burning local political issues etc. His fellow barflies were more important as sources of germane questions than as sources of definitive answers.

Raban's perspective on the St. Louis metropolitan area is one that I can vouch for personally, having visited there 10 years after he did. Furthermore Jonathan Franzen's novel The Twenty-seventh City is an elaborate description of the city-county socio-politico-economic tensions during the late 1980s. The continuum between Raban and Franzen's descriptions is pretty easy to imagine. Franzen grew up in the county and would have been a teen-ager when Raban was shacked up with his rich, wigged-out girlfriend out in Clayton.

I took one long journey through the US accompanied by a Danish friend. Upon learning that my traveling companion was a foreigner nearly every American that we encountered relaxed almost visibly and began to wax philosophical about the state of things. The radius of their sphere of interest varied, but everyone had an opinion about something. It was delightful to see that Mr. Raban experienced this same lowering of guard and move toward introspection as soon as he announced that he was an Englishman traveling in the US.

The parochial character and narrow-mindedness of many of the people he encountered matches up well with my own experiences in similar terrain four years after his journey. It is important to note though that Raban was treated to extraordinary amounts of generosity, both material and emotional, by the people that he met, however rhetorically bigoted they might have been. The author is at pains to acknowledge both the generosity and the puzzling disconnect that he sees between their rhetoric and their behavior.

Just one of the wonderful things that Jonathan Raban does in the course of Old Glory is show the reader the essence of American character. Their aggressive rhetoric is their shield against the unknown, but once you are brought in behind that shield, Americans are among the most outrageously generous and genuinely good people that you are likely to find.

I have owned at least two copies of this book and voyaged with Raban at least half a dozen times down the river. Each time some new little part of this beautifully written book seems to highlight itself. Raban has a great sense of humor, writes with an incisive and sometimes unkind clarity that has obviously upset some of the reviewers. I can understand that. It could be a shock if you set off down the river thinking your companion is a perfect English gentleman and find instead he is a slightly cynical foreigner, who is very perceptive but often unkind. It would not surprise me if some of the people he met along the way felt ill-used on reading the book. But wonderful writing has little to do with being Mr. Nice guy. This book was written during Carter's presidency and captures this period magnificently. It is one of my all time favorites.

Cerebral, yet entirely accessible, Old Glory is difficult to peg in terms of genre. Travel narrative approaches, but any classification would fall well short of the mark. Raban incorporates history, mesmerizing descriptive prose, biographical morsels, and sparse but welcome bits of dry British wit in this journey through America atop its longest river. In fact, Raban's Englishness is part of what makes the book so appealing. You see America, warts and all, from the eyes of an intrepid and analytical outsider. Raban is a stylist who reveals himself to the reader slowly. I found him to be a very interesting, complex, and slightly tortured figure. He is nearly as intriquing as the voyage itself.

Never again will I look at the Mississippi River as just some long line on a map. The whirlpools, the logs, the dangers; always moving atop and into the unknown on a vessel ridiculously undersized and unsuited for such a trip; a metaphor, certainly. In terms of writing style, there cannot be many better than Jonathan Raban. Here's a writer, you think, you will come back to.

Troy Parfitt, author of Why China Will Never Rule the World

It is hard to know if Mr. Raban actually traveled the Mississippi River by boat or hovered about it, godlike, critically recording his observations, condemning its inhabitants, dismissing its culture, while taking time to move in with, then abandon, two unfortunate women living on its shore. An English gentleman he is not.

From his account we not only learn of the boils, the eddies, the wing-dams and other dangers of the river but gain insight into the pompous, arrogant and shallow mind of a sort we hoped had long ago became extinct on the British Isle.

Mr. Raban may have intended to steal from Steinbeck's "Travels with Charlie" but he came away empty handed, like a thief who passes up diamonds for cheap glass. Steinbeck, after all, also sought the good. His observations were disturbing but inspiring. For Steinbeck there was good and with the good there was hope. Mr. Raban, on the other hand, is the Mister Magoo of travel writers, overlooking beauty for decay, progress for stagnation and mistaking his own bigotry for insight.

Mr. Raban lamented that he traveled the river alone. After reading "Old Glory", I can understand why. Given the choice, even a loyal dog like Charlie would have declined to go along and found other things to do.

Um, fellow reviewers, do you think that every little town in America is a picture postcard? Or do you not think there is a dark side to life in London, New York, or in any little burg one might chance upon, say, going down the Mississippi? Do you think that people don't have a disgruntled, distrustful side as well as a kind, generous side? Would you, in short, prefer a chintzy Hallmark postcard to a well-penned, thoughtful, erudite travel book, such as this?--If so, why did you bother reading or reviewing it?

As Raban remarks to one of his inquisitors, he in not a journalist and this book is about him and his impressions on his, brave or quixotic, depending on how you view it, travel down the Mississippi inspired by dreams of it since a boyhood reading of Mark Twain.

Yes, some of it is sad and melancholy. But often it is laugh-out-loud funny at the author's expense as much as at the expense of any of the people he meets. It is often very bracing and generous; and erudite, like all of Raban's writings.

As a refutation to all the nay-sayers, please cast your eye on the last page of Chapter 10 where he opens the note from the tow captain he has been accompanying:

"I opened it ten minutes later and read it by the light of a city streetlamp, with the paper dimpling in the warm rain.

"I know very little
of writers, but people
I do no. You are a
Good man to ride
The River with, Jonathan Ravan
Bob Kelley
Master M/v Jimmie L.
Dec. 7, 1979"

It was the one certificate I had most wanted to earn."

Another fantastic book by Raban, the greatest, most thoughtful, introspective, literate travel writer alive today.

First I read Huckleberry Finn and then I read Raban's Old Glory. Now I always recommend that the two be read together. The order does not matter. The small town people Twain wrote about are still there according to Raban. His humor and outsider's understanding of American kookiness was sharp, entertaining and to the point.

As An European, I have travelled quite frequently through the US and know many of the locations along The Mississippi. Jonathan Raban very carefully observes the unique way of living along the main artery of the USA in a critical but frequently very funny way (at least when not being American - this also explains the 1-star rating of a fellow reader who must be an American that cannot accept observations from outside; they will be in the minority when reading the excellent book by Raban, I believe); great that it appeared as a paperback in 1998 - it took me two years to find a hardcover version)

Raban left his wife in England and went to live in the States a number of years ago. He's written a number of great books about America and this is his best. He remarried and lived in Seattle, but is now divorced again. You won't see too many photos of a smiling, happy Raban- but apart from his Passage to Junea and his fiction, everything he's written is first class