Rating: 
Summary: A GOOD READ
Review: This is a book about Bill Bryon's cross-country road trip across the United States. This is more a pleasure read than a book to use as a travel reference as he covers so much ground that he has to fly by places and misses quite a bit. He is, as usual, quite funny and very fussy!! He likes to complain so don't take it personally if he happens to rag on your little town. I have been to a few of the places he ragged on and actually found them quite pleasant. Mostly I think he is just looking for humor in places and also for perfection. It is a good book for outsiders considering a trip to the US who can't decide which section of the country to visit. He covers the East coast, the south, the midwest, the wild west and some of the north. He drives through, I believe, about 38 states. He does not visit Texas, Alaska or Hawaii and I think he also skips Florida but I don't really remember. He does hit most major cities and several National Parks. If you do decide to come, do more research than Bill b/c since he covered so much ground in such a short time he had to miss quite a bit... like if he only saw Times Square and 5th Avenue in NY he missed A LOT(and no wonder he was frightened! heehee). This book was quite useful b/c there are now many new places on my long list of places I want to go! You will get some good ideas for long weekend road trips if you live in the US or Canada. I only gave this book 3 stars because I gave his other book "A Walk in the Woods" 5 stars and to be fair to that book which I think is even better than this one I could only give this one 3. But I highly recommend it especially if you are already a Bryson fan. Bravo Bryson!!
Rating: 
Summary: Flawed but entertaining
Review: I should state up front that I am a huge fan of Bryson's and usually snatch up his books the moment they hit the bookstores. I re-read this one recently and had a few thoughts to share. Compared to his books about England and Europe, this one falls a little flat. There's a lot more personal observation and anecdote and less history. The constant references to his father (cheap, bad driver, obsessed with historical trivia) grow a little wearing. One can't help wondering what the rest of the family thinks of all this. As a veteran of long road trips across North America myself, I can sympathize with the boredom he feels. If it weren't for the changing geography, it would be hard to tell where you are sometimes; everywhere you see the same tourist junk, fast food and strip malls. Bryson is rightly outraged at the disappearance of local "character" and the cheesiness of mass culture. I think many of the negative reviews come from people outraged to find their own hometowns, states or regions slighted, which is understandable but does colour their opinion too much, I think. Try to set aside the outrage and ask where Bryson is coming from. There's one thing Bryson consistently does in his books which I find very tiresome: pointing out women he finds fat or disgusting, enumerating their faults, and even extrapolating on their character flaws, personality defects, etc. Bill, I'm a big fan, but you're no poster boy for sculpted abs yourself. ;) Even if you were, it wouldn't give this observations any validity. It's a cheap, nasty, adolescent thing to do and frankly I expect better. (OK, off my soapbox now) Overall, a book that locates the tackier, more disappointing sides of American life in a very amusing fashion. Let's not try to pretend that everything about America is always wonderful, pretty or important.
Rating:
Summary: A hilarious stab at the American heartland?
Review: Perhaps so, but in a good natured "poke-in-the-ribs" sort of way. Born and raised in Iowa ("I come from Des Moines. Somebody had to."), Bryson left the plains to live in England. He returns to write about the land of his childhood. What results is an engagingly humorous look of the world he left behind through his (now) foreign perspective. In the great American tradition of the road trip, Bryson - sans screaming kids - decides to venture forth to document the America he knew and offer insight on what's changed. The book is divided into two trips. One going east, through Ohio, the deep south ("Welcome to Mississippi, we shoot to kill"), through New England back to Des Moines. The other going west to Nebraska, New Mexico, California etc. Through his trips, Bryson details his elusive search for Amalgam, the imaginary utopian American town comprising of hte desirable characteristics of the various towns visited. While offering some astute observations, he unashamedly resorts to harp on the stereotypical which while occasionally funny, gets tiresome after awhile. Admittedly, while Bryson is one of many who have attempted this sort of transcontinental travel writing (think "Travels with Charley" by Steinbeck), his brand of humor is immediately recognizable to an American audience. American readers who might be a tad offended by his travelogue might want to read his take on England as well. One of the better books in the humorous travel writing genre, if there's one.
Rating:
Summary: Very Enjoyable, Interesting and Funny
Review: Since I had read a couple of other books by the author, I expected to laugh out loud a little and chuckle a lot, but I didn't expect to learn so much about America as I did. This is a very enjoyable book. You can't have thick skin if you read it though. Bryson is pretty critical of some of the places he visits.
Rating: 
Summary: Welcome to Dullsville
Review: Bill Bryson must suffer from an exaggerated sense of self-importance if he thought the reading public would be interested in this dreadfully dull account of his road trip through small-town America. Is there some reason why I should care that Bill thinks South Carolina is boring or that he wishes billboards still lined the roadways of Illinois? Some amusing or mildly interesting anectdotes might have kept me awake during this reading road trip through Yawnsville, but Bill provided no engaging tales or commentary to keep me awake. He writes: "South Carolina was boring. For the sake of haste I got on Interstate 26, which runs in a 200-mile diagonal across the state, through a monotonous landscape of dormant tobacco fields and salmon-colored soil." Talk about boring. Talk about monotonous. Try reading this book! If insomnia is a problem for you, then this book could be the cure. It's one big yawn.
Rating: 
Summary: A Reluctant Thumbs Down
Review: After having read another book by Bill Bryson, "A Walk in the Woods: Rediscovering America on the Appalachian Trail," I was prepared to love this book. Unfortunately, it came nowhere near meeting my expectations. Perhaps I expected too much. I suppose a part of me was comparing it to Steinbeck's "Travels With Charlie," which isn't really fair. "The Lost Continent" is really meant to be a witty account of the author's travels through America in search of The Perfect Small Town. Unfortunately, the one thing that struck me most in this book was that Bill Bryson spent an awfully large amount of time driving in his car being bored. He makes snide remarks about every person he meets who doesn't immediately welcome him to the community (and even about the few who do) but his description of his appearance and of his conversations with the locals lead me to wonder whether anyone in his or her right mind would really want to talk to him at all. I did make it through the entire book, and I did chuckle a few times, but I am still looking for that witty update to "Travels with Charlie."
Rating:
Summary: A superficial and unsympathetic trip through small towns
Review: This is a very disappointing book! The premise is that Bryson, raised in Des Moines and now living in England, comes back to revisit some of the places his father took the family on dreadful summer family vacations. The book has a promising start, with a very amusing description of life in Des Moines and rural Iowa. But once he hits the road (2 big loops, one through the East and one through the West), it gets pretty dreadful. Bryson never stays long enough anywhere to get to know anything about the places he visits (a few hours in Williamsburg, a few hours at the Grand Canyon, straight through Jackson Hole without stopping,...). He seems singularly bad a finding pleasant places to stay or decent places to eat. Bryson doesn't select high or low points to describe in detail, but seems to give about the same emphasis to almost every place he stays. The good thing about this book is that, if you have short periods in which to read something, it's really easy to put this one down in the middle of a chapter.
Rating: 
Summary: Brilliantly funny and observant
Review: Some of the comments I have heard from American friends and family weren't exactly positive. Although they thought it was somewhat funny, they felt Bill Bryson was bashing their country. Somehow they missed the fact that the whole point of Bill Bryson's writing is to show the funny side of just about everything. I never felt insulted when he came to europe and made fun of Europe, because he was write! In The Lost Continent, Bill Bryson returns to America after having lived in America for a long time, and decides to travel from his hometown Des Moines towards the south, to trace the routes his dad took their family on when he was younger. The endless markers that indicated little more than that some important person or another stopped there and might have used the bushes for a toilet three hundred years ago, the hours of travelling through the middle of nowhere, bored as hell. His description is enough to probably never want to see any of the places he visits, but his observations of the people and what life would be like in these towns are outrageously funny, as are the accents he very succesfully manages to write down. "I've been here for one and a half hour and still haven't been shot!" when asked how he likes the state he just entered (I believe it was Mississippi, although Bryson himself seemed to ve some trouble understanding what was said as well). As expected of a Bill Bryson book, the story is wonderful, he gets his facts right (the book is more than just a collection of jokes), his observations are hilarious, and I could wish for nothign but to have written it myself.
Rating:
Summary: harsh, at times even mean... but accurate and funny
Review: Enough has been written about this book that I'll focus on trying to help the prospective reader sort it out. It is praised for being funny and for its brutal truthfulness; it is maligned for its harsh comments and putdowns. Both are true enough, so the real question is whether you would like it or not. If you have a romantic feel about small-town America, and if you're firm in your conviction that it's the world's greatest country, I doubt you'll enjoy Bryson's take on it. He sees no beauty in a plain landscape; if it's not fancy and breathtaking, it bores him, and he says so. It's safe to say that if he ever retraces his steps, there will be a few detractors here and there who'll take him to task for what he had to say about them. If on the other hand you believe that we should above all be able to take a joke, and that if it's the truth, it needs to be said even if it's pretty unflattering, you're going to really like Bryson's approach. I've seen a good portion of the parts of the nation Bryson saw, and the fact is, he's right. We can either have a good laugh on ourselves, or we can pout, but it won't change the facts--and if we don't pout, we prove ourselves maybe not to be as small-minded as he thought. And his perspective, after twenty years abroad, is fresher than ours. I think he has some great insights. Even if he's all wet, he sure speaks his mind. The only area in which his portrayal rings a little hollow is when he describes tourists. To hear Bryson talk, every American tourist he saw was an overweight, flowery-shirted, pasty-fleshed dork, talking loudly, tipping meanly and appreciating nothing. Here's a little bit of honesty for Bryson (fair's fair, right?): considering how much of America he didn't appreciate because it didn't overwhelm him with its urbanity, neatness and monumental beauty, he hasn't really given us any reason not to consider him as just another tourist conforming to his own stereotype of tourists. In fairness to him, though, let it be said that he occasionally does at least catch himself in a moment of undue harshness, and that in the end, his own home state of Iowa looks pretty good to him--flatness, down-home attitudes, croplands and all. (I could have told him that in advance and saved him a lot of driving.:)) If your main goal is to enjoy humour about America, or to read perceptive observations about it, this is a must-have. Wouldn't be a bad gift for foreign friends interested in learning more about the real America, too, if you get sick of people thinking the whole country is basically L.A. If you're prone to take some harsh comments about your state or region or the people in it personally, though, Bryson may offend the heck out of you and you probably wouldn't like his book.
Rating:
Summary: sardonic - derisively mocking or disdainfully humorous
Review: Bryson's account proves to me that education leaves a lot to be desired. Some quotes..."the Sunday New York Times - and it's well worth every trembling leaf. So what if our grandchildren have no oxygen to breathe? F**ck 'em". "The average Southerner has the speech patterns of someone slipping in and out of consciousness". "I was alone with a small bag of pathetic treats in the most boring town in America". I think the most boring part of the trip was Bryson himself. Although his writing shows glimpses of real humor, and real wit, most of his attempted humor is at the expense of real people. People who wisely left this pompous fool alone. I'm glad I picked up the hardcover version of this book at a garage sale for 50 cents. Then again, maybe I overpaid.
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