Tony Horwitz Pulitzer
The book that changed my life...
Jonathan Raban's Old Glory is my favourite work of travel adventure, by a bookish Englishman who decides to live out his boyhood dream and travel down the Mississippi River in a small boat.
This romantic-sounding journey turns into a darkly comic misadventure, much of it spent at shabby taverns in has-been river towns.
Old Glory is poignant, wise, savagely funny, and true to Middle America, where I lived when I first read it as a restless young reporter in my 20s.
Right away, I knew I wanted to embark on my own adventures and write a book like Raban's when I grew up.
Twenty-five years later, I still do.
A Voyage Long and Strange by Tony Horwitz will be published next month (John Murray) $35