Travel down the Mississippi River begun in 1979.

What does the "war on terror" and a new era of religious ferocity look like to an Englishman living in the Pacific Northwest? Jonathan Raban finds that as he reads the source texts that have inspired modern-day jihad, memories of his own rigidly fundamentalist adolescent atheism help him understand why young people suffering from cultural alienation, spiritual emptiness, and moral uncertainty turn to a backward-looking version of Islam to help them...

"A poignant memoir of recovery and reflection after a life-changing stroke, by a winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award"-- June 2011. Just days before his sixty-ninth birthday, Jonathan Raban was sitting down to dinner with his daughter when he found he couldn't move his knife to his plate. Later that night, at the hospital, doctors confirmed he had suffered a massive hemorrhagic stroke, paralyzing the right side of his body. Once he became...