Watson - American Journeys

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 produced an engaging meditation on the United States.

G LYN D AVIS , A USTRALIAN B OOK R EVIEW

This is not travelogue, it is dazzlingly eloquent and perceptive. 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 hes right up there with Tocqueville, and as a story-teller he loses nothing to Theroux.

T OM K ENNEALLY

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.

M ARK T HOMAS , C ANBERRA T IMES

American Journeys is an unusually sensitive and thoughtful tour of the US continent.

T HE S YDNEY M ORNING H ERALD

The curmudgeonly, wise and witty Don Watson travels through Middle America by road and train, observing an America that we see little of.

M ARK R UBBO , R EADINGS

American Journeys is not only a thoroughly enjoyable travel narrative, but more ambitiously a kind of 21st-century postscript to Alexis de Tocquevilles 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.

G RAEME M OORE , A USTRALIAN B OOKSELLER AND P UBLISHER

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 readers 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. Watson understands exactly how much the experiment of America matters.

M ORAG F RASER , T HE A GE

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.

B IG I SSUE A USTRALIA

American Journeys is a beautiful work. Not so much a woodworm in the bark of the republic as a probe deep into the American mindset.

T HE C OURIER -M AIL

Criss-crossing the greatest nation by car and train, Watson proves the perfect traveling 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 Watsons gaze, that shapes his journeys destination.

R OBYN A NNEAR AND B RENDA N IALL J UDGES A GE B OOK OF THE Y EAR A WARD

The strength of American Journeys is Watsons 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 Americas physical beauty, he often evokes it with poetic deftness.

D ELIA F ALCONER , T HE M ONTHLY

Caledonia Australis

Recollections of a Bleeding Heart

Death Sentence

Watsons Dictionary of Weasel Words

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American Journeys

ePub ISBN 9781742744506

A Vintage book
Published by Random House Australia Pty Ltd
Level 3, 100 Pacific Highway, North Sydney, NSW 2060
www.randomhouse.com.au

First published by Knopf in 2008
This edition published by Vintage in 2009

Copyright Don Watson 2008

The moral right of the author has been asserted.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted by any person or entity, including internet search engines or retailers, in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying (except under the statutory exceptions provisions of the Australian Copyright Act 1968 ), recording, scanning or by any information storage and retrieval system without the prior written permission of Random House Australia.

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National Library of Australia
Cataloguing-in-Publication Entry

Watson, Don, 1949.
American journeys.

ISBN 978 1 74166 621 2 (pbk).

Watson, Don, 1949 Travel United States.
United States Politics and government Philosophy.

Cover design by Christabella Designs
Map design by Caroline Bowie
Illustrations by Craig McGill/ www.realnasty.com.au

To E.M.W.

America, you have it better.

Goethe

I T WAS THE EVE OF MEMORIAL DAY, MAY 2005. O N A RISE OUTSIDE the old Kansas City Union Station, 25,000 people had gathered under the darkening sky to remember the fallen, to honour those who had served and to thank all those still serving in the United States armed forces.

The air was soft and cool and scented with the kettle corn that vendors sold in bags big enough for the weekend shopping. The Kansas City Symphony and a good tenor were there to play and sing Americas rousing songs. The people carried little flags which they waved whenever something stirred them, and they washed their corn down with cola. The tenor sang America the Beautiful. The words were written in 1893 by Katherine Lee Bates, who said they had come to her one day while standing on Pikes Peak, Colorado. The tune was borrowed from a seventeenth-century hymn, and a hymn it remains with the new words, and it has a hymns fortifying effect, even on ambivalent hearts.