Passage to Juneau
A Sea and Its Meanings

A simple recipe: find an interesting subject--location, community, event, person--bring yourself close to it, open your eyes, ears and notebook, and once the story is captured, write and publish. Yes, it requires an articulate writer, undeterred by obstacles, one able to smell out good stories, loc......more

Great book. Superficially a description of the author's 1,000 mile solo boat trip from Seattle to Juneau, the book is so much more than that. It started well, for me, with the author describing how he had chosen his boat primarily because it had mahogany bookshelves inside, shelves which he then pop......more

A watery, foggy, mildly adventurous book about a small boat trip from Seattle to Juneau. Raban covers the history of naming the geography on the coast between Seattle and Juneau, the legends of local indians, how the water shaped the people who lived on it and all kinds of other interesting things.......more

This is the best travel book I have read this ear (and I read a fair number of them). I am contemplating a trip up the Inside passage to Alaska -- though not aboard a giant cruise ship -- to see a number of the places that author Jonathan Raban saw on his solo voyage from Seattle to Juneau. Although......more

Beautifully written. Raban is a renaissance man with an unparalleled vocabulary, magnificent command of history, and a subtle appreciation of the nauances that separate the American, British, Canadian, and Native cultural and class landscapes he traverses. Raban, is, like the sea, very serious. Desp......more