American Journeys

Watson explores the citadel of liberty that became the world's supreme democracy and global superpower. Travelling by rail, `like a woodworm boring a tiny groove in the bark of the republic,' gave Watson a unique 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, which inside a tiny particle of the American people talked among themselves. He witnesses the terrible aftermath of Hurrican 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. Yet it is through the people he meets that he discovers the incomparable genius of America, its optimism, sophistication and riches - and also its darker side, its disavowal of failure and uncertainty...