home | the books | the articles | bits & bobs | biography | links and press The Site The Books "A collection of literature unequaled for style and consistency" more > The Articles "Raban's occasional journalism is like a running coversation with the world" more > Bits and Bobs Irregular short contributions from the desk of Jonathan Raban more> articles by jonathan raban Cut, Kill, Dig, Drill Sarah Palin has put a new face and voice to the long-standing, powerful, but inchoate movement in US political life that one might see as a mutant variety of Poujadism, inflected with a modern American accent. More > Crashing the Party The investment of the expatriate in his or her host country is very different from that of the roving correspondent. Though always perceived as a foreigner by the natives, you have a permanent stake in their politics and society. More > Second Nature When I was seventeen in 1959, the lake was as wild a place as I knew. My friend Jeremy Hooker and I would arrive there at around four a.m. in early summer, ditch our bikes in the tangle of rhododendrons, and pick out the narrow path by torchlight as we tiptoed, in existentialist duffel coats, through the brush. More > Just Two Clicks In January 2006, Neil Entwistle, a seemingly ordinary 27-year-old Englishman with an honours degree from the University of York, who had been living in the US for barely four months, shot dead his American wife, Rachel, and their baby daughter, Lillian. More > My Own Private Metropolis It's chastening to realise that, since Soft City's first publication in 1974, the book's citizens, nearly all in their go-getting 20s and 30s, have moved on to the world of bus passes, if not the Great Beyond. More > How US politics got personal The presidential campaign has changed the mood of America. Voters don't want to hear about Iraq, terrorism and the fallout from 9/11. Instead, they want to talk about identity - race, religion and the glass ceiling. But how long can this holiday last, asks Jonathan Raban. More > Down and Out in America's Last Boomtown In still-booming Seattle, it’s left to the homeless to remind us of economic calamity. More > Diary: I'm for Obama I want a hero: an uncommon want When every year and month sends forth a new one, Till, after cloying the gazettes with cant, The age discovers he is not the true one. Byron, Don Juan More > We are fighting the wrong battles Clinton and Obama share policies, but their administrations would differ in character entirely More > Planes, Trains and SUVs James Meek's last, bestselling novel, The People's Act of Love, published in 2005 to great critical acclaim, was set in 1919, in 'that part of Siberia lying between Omsk and Krasnoyarsk'. Anglophone readers who can locate 'that' part of Siberia without a good atlas deserve spot prizes. More > Divided they stand The candidates in the US presidential primaries stand for more than just differences of policy; they symbolise a nation fractured along religious, ethical, political, racial and class lines as never before, says author and commentator Jonathan Raban. More > Good news in bad times Barack Obama wooed Iowa with his language. But where did he learn it? Here, a leading writer finds the narrative and rhetoric belong to Obama's local pastor, Jeremiah Wright More > The Perfect City I dream of living in a city like Dickens's London, that marvellous labyrinth of dark alleys, secrets, surprises, extreme economic inequalities, coincidences, possibilities, where every kind of human imperfection and eccentricity finds its niche. More > Boomtown USA No city I knew seemed on such comfortable and unselfconscious terms with its own beginnings. I warmed to Seattle’s downtown, its modest cluster of skyscrapers rising from streets still dominated by turn-of-the-century brick-and-stucco examples of far-west neoclassical swank. More > The Atomic Bazaar, by William Langewiesche: The nuclearization of the world One need read only the first three pages of "The Atomic Bazaar" to be reminded of William Langewiesche's formidable talent as a journalist whose cool, precise and economical reporting is harnessed to an invigorating moral and intellectual perspective on the world he describes. More > A Drive From Wet to East FOR my eighth-grade daughter’s spring break this year, we drove, on minor roads, from Seattle through Washington, Oregon, Nevada, Utah and Arizona, to see the Grand Canyon - past 1,500 miles of landscape utterly new to her, although, born in Seattle, she is a native Westerner. More > Cracks in the House of Rove Jonathan Raban reviews "The Conservative Soul: How We Lost It, How to Get It Back" by Andrew Sullivan, in the New York Review of Books. "neocon theorists, Goldwater-style libertarians, the corporations, and grassroots Christian fundamentalists come to the aggravating discovery that they're more defined by their differences than by what they hold in common." More > Literature's DNA From EM Forster to Ernest Hemingway to Saul Bellow, the Paris Review's respectful yet searching Q&As were bursting with practical advice for the young writer. Jonathan Raban welcomes their return. More > The Prisoners Speak Most moviegoers whom I've watched leaving the cinema after seeing The Road to Guantánamo have been wordless and whey-faced, numbed, as I was, by the film's distressingly vivid recreation of brutal interrogations in the American detention camp on Cuba's south coast (sequences that were filmed on location in—of all places—Iran). More > We have mutated into a surveillance society - and must share the blame In the last few years, most of us - even instinctive technophobes like me - have become practised in the dark art of surveillance. When I'm going to meet a stranger at dinner, I'll routinely feed her name to Google and LexisNexis to find out who she is and what she's been up to lately. More > The Greatest Gulf Jonathan Raban argues that, apart from the immediate cost in human life, military intervention in Iraq has also represented a disastrous failure of imagination and a fatal inability to understand the role of history - and religion - in the region More > Battleground of the Eye In the Pacific Northwest, more than any other region of America, landscape painting embodies all our conflicting views—our hopes and delusions, our regrets and ambitions—about the natural world and the place of human beings in it. The author travels across time and ideology, canvas by canvas. More > Emasculating Arabia Images of an American being beheaded in Iraq have horrified the west, but the photographs of prisoners being abused in Abu Ghraib jail sparked surprisingly little outrage among Arabs. Why? Because, says Jonathan Raban, it was precisely what they expected More > Here we go again The family dictatorships that dominate the Middle East are the legacy of fantasy borders drawn by colonial administrators. Now with the Bush administration pressing to topple Saddam, says Jonathan Raban, we may be about to repeat our mistakes - and do just what Bin Laden wants More > Dictatorship is the danger A Reagan-appointed supreme court justice voices her fears over attacks on US democracy More > the books Surveillance Explore the current political climate in this clever, unsettling novel set in a near-future Seattle More > buy at Amazon (US) > buy at amazon (UK) > My Holy War: Dispatches from the Home Front Raban showcases his unparalleled ability to articulate an incisive intellectual position from the morass More > buy at amazon (US) > buy at amazon (UK) > Waxwings a caustic, affectionate commentary on the manic gyrations of millennial America More > buy at Amazon (US) > buy at Amazon (UK) > Passage to Juneau: a sea and its meanings "Gallivanting around the world in a small boat is a continuing education in one's limitless capacity for self-delusion." More > buy at Amazon (US) > buy at Amazon (UK) > Badland: An American Romance "No one has evoked with greater power the marriage of land and sky that gives this country both its beauty and its terror." More > buy at Amazon (US) > buy at Amazon (UK) > Hunting Mr Heartbreak An exhilarating, often deliciously funny book that is at once a travelogue, a social history, and a love letter to the United States. More > buy at Amazon (US) > buy at Amazon (UK) > Soft City Part fact, part fiction, it holds up a mirror to the modern city and finds there a stage for a unique personal drama. More > buy at Amazon (US) > buy at Amazon (UK) > For Love & Money: Writing, Reading, Travelling 1968-1987 Reportage, travel writings and literary criticism. More > buy at Amazon (US) > buy at Amazon (UK) > God, Man and Mrs. Thatcher Provocative pamphlet More > buy at Amazon (US) > buy at Amazon (UK) > Foreign Land Foreign Land is an exquisitely moving tale of awkward relationships and quiet redemption. More > buy at Amazon (US) > buy at Amazon (UK) > Coasting “A lively, intensely personal recounting of a voyage into a gifted writer's country and self.” More > buy at Amazon (US) > buy at Amazon (UK) > Old Glory Witty, elegaic, and magnificently erudite, Old Glory is as filled with strong currents as the Mississippi itself. More > buy at Amazon (US) > buy at Amazon (UK) > Arabia A must read for anyone seeking to understand the Middle East and it's people. More > buy at Amazon (US) > buy at Amazon (UK) > © 2007, http://www.webkitchen.ie/  |   info@webkitchen.ie