Rating: 
Summary: Entertainment on the trail
Review: I fear that other reviewers - reviewers who rated the book poorly - have misunderstood the aim of the writer. This in not an Applalachian Trail (AT) guide book; it is entertainment book - otherwise known as literature - which has as it's setting the AT. While the author doubtless did make the hike, his writing style makes clear his aim.As one who spent a month on the AT, this book brought back fond, and not so fond, memories. I recommend it for entertainment and for a non-macho view of life on the trail.
Rating: 
Summary: The one that hooked me on Bryson
Review: You don't have to be a hiker. I'm not. You don't have to live anywhere near the Appalachian trail. I don't. You don't even have to put "commune with nature" above "hang out at Starbucks" on your to-do list to love this book. While the subject matter wasn't necessarily the first I would read about, the writing wooed me almost instantly. At times -- many times -- he's laugh-out-loud funny. He gives you well-tooled obervations about his friends, his family, his hiking companions. In other words, about people. Animals get their fair shake, too. His passage about spotting a moose at water's-edge is worth reading over and over again. Since reading this Bryson book, I've also read Notes From A Small Island. This one too, is a treasure. Take a trip to the trail, or to England. Just be sure to take it with Bryson.
Rating: 
Summary: More of the same condescension and nothing to back it up
Review: The only other Bill Bryson book I had read before A Walk In The Woods was The Lost Continent. At the time, I, like Bryson, was an American living in the United Kingdom, and was excited to see his perspective of this country having lived abroad. But instead of insight I found it incredibly condescending of Americans and his writing markedly snide. The sort of book that made fun of fat people for being fat. Haha. A Walk In The Woods is very much in that vein. Yes, Bryson indulges that guilty part of us that might like to look down on the less sophisticated, or physically awkward or fat, (especially because those things are so evident on what is a very difficult physical endeavour) but there isn't that much about what it's like to live on the trail for months at a time. And that's because he doesn't. It seems he spends as much time lambasting the National Park Service as he does actually hiking the trail and I left learning little about what it's like to walk in the woods. Day hike and drive it short sections of it, sure. Eat at bad restaurants along the trail, sure. But actually what it takes to hike its length. No. And to think that so much of the book is spent denigrating those that choose to quit: Hypocritical in the extreme.
Rating:
Summary: Funny Funny Funny!
Review: My best friend gave me this to read over summer break. Reluctantly, on command of my mother, I read this book aloud to her on a car trip to Philadelphia. No soon had I started had, my mother and I started laughing like crazy. This is an epic comedy and a personal favorite of mine out of all of Bryson's books.
I then, passed this book onto my best friend at camp and he read it in a week! Let me tell you, it MUST be good if you can convince a teenager to read a book while they are in Europe at summer camp at the beach.
Next this book was passed onto his little brother (age 10) and his mother and they too LOVED it.
Not only is this a comedy of 2 middle aged American men traveling, but it also gives a lot of information and so you are guarenteed to learn something while you are laughing helplessly.
Rating:
Summary: A Worthy Walk for the Armchair Traveler
Review: In the words of Bill Bryson he "happened upon a path that vanished into a wood on the edge of town." So begins a complex love/hate relationship with the Appalachian Trail that is equal parts hilarious travelogue and cautionary tale. Tightly written and wonderfully descriptive, A Walk in the Woods is the story of Bill and his sidekick Stephan Katz. These two are not your typical outdoorsman but two relatively sedentary middle-aged men who undertake one of the most challenging hikes on the continent armed with little more than a backpack full of Little Debbie cakes (soon abandoned)and the vague notion of hiking the two-thousand odd miles of the trail in one season. It's not spoiling the story to tell you they don't even come close to meeting that goal, but the story is so rich and so fun it helps demonstrate that the joy is really in the journey, not the destination. I loved this book for its honest and direct tone and the way Bryson kept me laughing from page one. A great read for a rainy winter afternoon.
Rating:
Summary: Informative and entertaining.
Review: I loved this book. I'm really sorry that some people found the information about the National Park Service a "bore". It was enlightening and disheartening to hear about what is being done to our National Parks. I also really enjoyed learning about the history of the Appalachian Trail.
Rating: 
Summary: Don't waste your time
Review: I am at a point in this book where I am ready to set it down and never pick it up again. Bryson should have stopped around page 150. The first part of the book was hilarious. Bryson finds himself with a friend from college, whom is described in a way that puts an image of Chris Farley hiking the Appalachian Trail in my mind. Bryson narrates the story very well. His details make you feel like you are really there with them. It is an experience! However, about halfway through, Bryson decides to take a break and go home for a month, planning on returning at a later date. He does, but attempts to hike the trail via car. It is one of the most senseless ideas I have ever heard, and eventually he realizes this. However, then he continues to dig himself deeper by taking unimportant day hikes on the trail to justify not finishing it. He tries to cover up the lack of events by giving us all kinds of background information on the National Forest service, hypothermia, and all kinds of diseases that are killing off trees. These numerous sections of the book made me feel as if I was reading the book for a class rather than for pleasure. He presented this information in a very bland manner. Therefore, the first half of the book is worth reading, but reading part 2 is not worth your time.
Rating: 
Summary: Interesting in Parts but Misanthropic & Suspect
Review: Though I found the subject matter interesting, I don't trust the author, his motives, his methods, his integrity (even though I agree with a number of his opinions on environmental matters and found interesting many of his nature observations). The turning point for me was the end of the first stage of the hike in Virginia. If it wasn't going to be a thru hike, he should have said so up front. When they skip up by rental car to Virginia, I was able to come to terms with that, but its only a good number of pages later that he obliquely describes that all along they were only going to hike for 6 & 1/2 weeks and Katz had a job lined up for summmer, etc. And when he finally says good bye at that point to Katz, he states that he doesn't think of Katz again for weeks. Apart from being very cold, could that possibly be true? (e.g. you mean he never mentioned Katz in trail stories he relates to his family during those weeks?) After that part of the book, my feel for it was not the same. The humor was comprised way too much of putdowns, and he seems to dislike (and in a very juvenile way call "stupid" -- the scene with the cab drivers was particularly offending) almost everyone he encounters ( I would have really hated this book if I was a Southerner). Why be a travel writer if you don't like people? My guess - for the money.
Rating:
Summary: Disappointing
Review: I was told to buy this book and it was a must read for a serious hiker like I am. What a big disappointment. I hate reading hiking reports where they start off, and keep, whinning and complaining about everything. I also expected that he was actually going to walk the whole thing and straight through (he was writing a book about this experience!). Instead these two out of shape slobes walk and complain from one shelter to the next and couldn't wait for the next hotel/restaurant. Then they poop out after just a small portion. He then took a break and came back later closer to home, skipping a big portion. For filler for the book, since he didn't have much "good" hiking to talk about, he fills it with miscellaneous tid bits.
Rating:
Summary: A very enjoyable read ! Hilarious! Bryson's best !
Review:
This is the first Bill Bryson book that I bought and read. Since buying this book, I have also bought and read his other books - Neither Here Nor There, Notes From a Small Island, and Made In America. It turns out that A Walk in the Woods is his very best. It has a lot of hilarious moments in it. I really enjoy his brand of humor. Living out West, I didn't even know about the existence of the Appalachian Trail until I read this book. Besides being a great read, I learned a lot from this book, since Bill Bryson also tells you about how the trail came into being, and also tells you many interesting tidbits as you travel with him along the trail. Here are some of the things that I learned from the book:The Appalachian Trail runs over 2,100 miles from Springer Mountain in Georgia to Mount Katahdin in Maine, crossing through 14 states along the way. The Appalachian Trail was formally completed on August 14, 1937. "Every year between early March and late April, about 2,000 hikers set off from Springer Mountain, most of them intending to go all the way to Katahdin. No more than 10 percent actually make it. Half don't make it past central Virginia, less than a third of the way. A quarter get no farther than North Carolina, the next state. As many as 20 percent drop out the first week." (P.31) "About 240 million acres of America's forests are owned by the government. The bulk of this - 191 million acres, spread over 155 parcels of land - is held by the U.S. Forest Service under the designations of National Forests, National Grasslands, and National Recreation Areas. The Forest Service is truly an extraordinary institution. A lot of people, seeing that word forest in the title, assume it has something to do with looking after trees. In fact, no - thought that was the original plan... In fact, mostly what the Forest Service does is build roads. I am not kidding. There are 378,000 miles of roads in America's national forests. That may seem like a meaningless figure, but look at it this way - it is eight times the total mileage of America's interstate highway system. It is the largest road system in the world in control of a single body. The Forest Service has the second highest number of road engineers of any government institution on the planet. It is the avowed aim of the U.S. Forest Service to construct 580,000 miles of additional forest road by the middle of next century.
The reason that the Forest Service builds these roads, quite apart from the deep pleasure of doing noisy things in the woods with big yellow machines, is to allow private timber companies to get to previously inaccessible stands of trees....
Eighty percent of its leasing arrangements lost money, often vast amounts. In one typical deal, the Forest Service sold hundred-year-old lodgepole pines in the Targhee National Forest in Idaho for about $2 each after spending $4 per tree surveying the land, drawing up contracts, and, of course, building roads. Between 1989 and 1997, it lost an average of $242 million a year - almost $2 billion all told, according to the Wilderness Society." (P.46-48) " In constant dollars, the Park Service budget is $200 million dollars a year less than it was a decade ago. In consequence, even as visitor numbers have soared - from 79 million in 1960 to almost 270 million today - campsites and interpretation centers have been shut, warden numbers slashed, and essential maintenance deferred to a positively ludicrous degree. By 1997, the repair backlog for the national parks had reached $6 billion. All quite scandalous. But consider this. In 1991, as its trees were dying, its buildings crumbling, its visitors being turned away from campgrounds it could not afford to keep open, and its employees being laid off in record numbers, the National Park Service threw a seventy-fifth anniversary party for itself in Vail, Colorado. It spent $500,000 on the event...." (P.94)
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