My Holy War

Jonathan Raban was the author of over a dozen books, both fiction and non-fiction, including Passage to Juneau, Bad Land, Hunting Mister Heartbreak, Coasting, Old Glory, Arabia, Soft City, Waxwings and Surveillance. Over the span of six decades, he won the National Book Critics Circle Award, the Royal Society of Literature’s Heinemann Award, the Thomas Cook Award, the PEN West Creative Nonfiction Award, the Pacific Northwest Booksellers’ Award, and the Governor’s Award of the State of Washington. His work appeared in The New Yorker, Granta, Harpers, The New York Review of Books, Outside, Atlantic Monthly, New Republic, The London Review of Books, and other magazines.In 1990 Raban, a British citizen, moved from London to Seattle, where he lived with his daughter until his death in 2023.

‘Raban eloquently argues . . . that the Bush administration’s bellicose unilateralism abroad and burgeoning security state at home were neither the necessary nor best response to the attacks of 2001. Rather, the administration capitalized on an exceptional moment of national unity to take the country down a dangerously antidemocratic, Manichean path that wedded widespread religious faith to a right-wing imperial agenda. As a potent prose stylist and keen observer of the American scene, Raban charts with rare luminosity the changes and widening fissures in American society from 9/11 through 7/7, which makes revisiting even topics like Howard Dean’s presidential race worthwhile. Several thoughtful and compelling chapters grapple, meanwhile, with the largely Western and entirely modern origins of Islamist extremism, drawing on Raban’s demonstrated familiarity with the Middle East . . . The book’s defence of reason over militant irrationalism, resting as it does on the author’s formidable talent for insight and analogy, will inspire readers with the underlying issues at play in this dizzying, event-crammed historical moment’ Publishers Weekly