Description of book
Only in America - the most powerful democracy on earth, home to the best and worst of everything - are the most extreme contradictions possible. In a series of journeys acclaimed author Don Watson set out to explore the nation that has influenced him more than any other.
Travelling by rail gave Watson a unique and seductive means of peering into the United States, a way to experience life with its citizens: long days with the American landscape and American towns and American history unfolding on the outside, while inside a tiny particle of the American people talked among themselves.
Watson's experiences are profoundly affecting: he witnesses the terrible aftermath of Hurricane Katrina on the Gulf Coast; explores the savage history of the Deep South, the heartland of the Civil War; and journeys to the remarkable wilderness of Yellowstone National Park. Yet it is through the people he meets that Watson discovers the incomparable genius of America, its optimism, sophistication and riches - and also its darker side, its disavowal of failure and uncertainty.
Beautifully written, with gentle power and sly humour, AMERICAN JOURNEYS investigates the meaning of the United States: its confidence, its religion, its heroes, its violence, and its material obsessions. The things that make America great are also its greatest flaws.
Reviews
2008 Age Book of the Year
2008 Age Non-fiction Book of the Year
2008 Independent Bookseller's Indie non-fiction Award
2008 Shortlisted Queensland Premier's Awards
"The best book by an outsider about America since - forever"
David Sedaris
Traveling by train, the Australian author scans a post-Katrina America while racking up an impressive trove of insight and observation few natives could match.
Newsweek ‘What to Read Now and Why’
“There are passages in this book so good they demand to be read aloud, aphorisms worth turning and examining closely, the distillation of a life thinking about the glamorous America first seen in childhood, later complicated by a thousand contrary images, but still tugging at the imagination. Don Watson has written a profound and deeply personal work that makes for itself a place in the great tradition of American journeys.”
Glyn Davis, Australian Book Review
“Mark Twain, Jonathan Raban, Jack Kerouac and Andrew Ferguson would provide tough competition for anyone. Here, Watson competes with whimsy, with curiosity and with an open mind, all backed up by an extremely well-read, closely-watched, examination of wherever he happens to be.”
Mark Thomas, Canberra Times
“This thought provoking travel book takes its readers to the very heart of America.”
TNT magazine
"Both [Watson and Tocqueville] are fascinated by the Americans, and make uncommon effort to see beyond the obvious. They share a preference for close observation, and a startling capacity to draw broader patterns from the small and familiar…Don Watson has produced an engaging meditation on the United States…The book is beautifully written, with a form that evokes W.G. Sebald's wandering across Europe…
Glyn Davis
Vice-Chancellor of the University of Melbourne
Australian Book Review
This is not travelogue, it is dazzlingly eloquent and perceptive; it is the Tocqueville of damaged but persistent and enduring dreams. Like Tocqueville, and unlike much writing by foreigners about the United States, it is affectionate and comes across the many Americas and their oddities with an uncondemning eye. It is entertaining and celebrates the not-often mentioned capacity of Americans to talk, narrate their lives and utter orations, a tendency which has always interested me as a foreigner. It is full of incident and consistently engaging. As a star of the epigram he's right up there with Tocqueville, and as a story-teller he loses nothing to Theroux.
Tom Keneally
"In American Journeys, Don Watson gives us a timely up-close portrait of the USA today. Criss-crossing the greatest nation by car and train, Watson proves the perfect travelling companion: funny, well versed, generous, uncomplaining. And observant. Watson is sublimely attuned to the subtleties of language, self-delusion and bastardry, his observations ranging from gentle to wry to cut yourself sharp. He allows himself, and the reader, to be pleasantly surprised by and even faintly - very faintly - hopeful about the America he encounters in his travels. But it is Americans’ treasured notions of freedom, forcing itself constantly under Waton's gaze, that shapes his journey's destination."
Robyn Annear and Brenda Niall - Judges Age Book of the Year Award
"The historian (a mantle Watson wears so lightly it is near invisible) supplies the context that makes the questions so pointed. But it is the ironist who makes them rasp in the reader's mind…Culture warriors very quickly divide the world into those who love and those who hate America. AMERICAN JOURNEYS is a detailed and articulate general response to such lazy dichotomies. Like the novelist-traveller Charles Dickens before him, Watson can claim "Prejudiced I am not". With Dickens he manifests "a grateful interest in the country". And like Dickens and Alexis de Tocqueville, who visited America before them both, Watson understands exactly how much the experiment of America matters."
Morag Fraser
The Age
"…the strength of AMERICAN JOURNEYS is Watson's resistance to the ecstatic pleasures of disapproval with which this country has long dazzled, even beguiled its visitors. He is as prepared to observe the extraordinary kindnesses of fellow passengers as he is to note their less attractive qualities. Alert to America's physical beauty, he often evokes it with poetic deftness."
Delia Falconer
The Monthly
"AMERICAN JOURNEYS is not only a thoroughly enjoyable travel narrative, but more ambitiously a kind of 21st-century postscript to Alexis de Tocqueville's Democracy In America …Watson is an acute observer, highly critical, often very funny and always prepared to accept, if not understand, the contradictions of everyday America."
Graeme Moore
Australian Bookseller and Publisher
"In prose so perfect it makes you gasp, Watson captures what it feels like to live in contemporary America: the smells, the sounds, the shared beliefs and points of contention, and the everyday barriers to the good life"
Jo Case
Big Issue Australia
"Australia's best selling author returns with a superb book about his journeys around America - this is travel writing at its very best"
Suzy Wilson
Southeast Advertiser
"The book is inspiring original, challenging, elegantly written, and a perfect antidote to a culture overdosing on smug, upbeat food-and-entertainment porn so often disguised as travel writing."
Jason Catlett
Time Out Sydney